The Best American Poetry

Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“Songlines” by Marco Berrettini. Photo © Laurent Philippe

The Ballet de Lorraine opened its 2023-2024 season at the beginning of November with Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques (“Mountains: ambiance dances”) and Marco Berrettini’s Songlines (“Dream tracks”), both of them visually lovely and perceptually stimulating.

“Visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” makes me think how much more like science than esthetics dance experience is. More like peering through a telescope than, say, a kaleidoscope.

For a telescope, you’ve got to acquire a steady hand and agile eye before you can see anything at all. Whatever you discover after learning not jiggle is dependent on previous experience from within and without yourself, along with intense, very fragile and very fickle observation. Watch out! Looking for god-knows-what one deep winter’s night in Upstate New York, my Dad got lost up there and got frost bite.

After seeing Danses atmosphériques and Songlines, I had the good luck to chat informally over dinner with Petter Jacobsson, the Ballet’s director, and Thomas Caley, the artistic researcher. Jacobsson and Caley are a life couple. Beyond their affinities, Jacobsson has been insistently, consistently and publicly affirming Caley’s role as his indispensable creative partner throughout his more than 10-year tenure at the Ballet.

After about half hour’s sit down with Caley, I understood Jacobsson on both heads.

The 2023-2024 season in Nancy is the last for the creative couple. Instantly forever is the working title of their goodbye piece. It opens on 7 March 2024 and runs until the 12 March 2024 at the Opéra National de Lorraine, Nancy, with Marco da Silva Ferreira’s a Folia, also a new creation, sharing the bill.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

Speaking of Instantly forever, Songlines, Mountains and personal and creative partnerships, and by the way, my thanks to Robert Weissberg. He was an assistant professor at Skidmore College. Back in 1972, he gave me boxes of books to take along to the Army with me.

When he gave me them, he said that taken together the books pretty much made up the sum total of a liberal education for our times. I’ve discovered that’s pretty much true, too; Hegel and Vico are pretty much in the ballpark on politics and history, Candide pretty much on life and Jung pretty much on experience. To add to this existing knowledge, during supper, Caley & Jacobsson recommended David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. The book begins with a quote from the Undiscovered Self: something like, the moment is right for a change of civilizations.

In my small experience of it, Caley & Jacobsson’s choreographic work has two striking features, which I should tell you about to fog up your telescope if you chance to see Instantly Forever.

The first feature is an un-narrative concern around what we call “time”. The second feature is…  – I want to say executed individuation of the choreographic artists involved, viz., Jung, viz., Dawn.  This want-to comes down to saying that, so far, walking away from any Ballet de Lorraine performance, I feel like I’ve seen each artist – experienced something beyond words that honors the un-narrative they are mapping for the choreography designer and spectators.

I can sum up my experience of Jacobsson & Caley’s work this way. At the core are firmly-grasped – “un-narrative” or “movement-only” – themes (such as “time”), and a thought-through choreography shared, shaped and executed by trusted fellow artists on a visually pleasing set.

So, no surprise that “visually lovely and perceptually stimulating” is my take on Berrettini’s Songlines and Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques. Jacobsson & Caley hired them, after all.

Berrettini’s dance note makes Songlines seem like there’s some civilizational or even political story in the dance, which at first put me off – dance and politics hardly ever can mix for me. Previously known to me for meta-satire performance, Berrettini writes that he crafted the choreography after reading Bruce Chatwin’s spiritual travelogue, The Songlines. He also cites the odd coincidence of the farmer’s eternal dissatisfaction with an imperfect world and the nomad’s satisfaction with a perfect one.

 

“Sierras” by Michele Di Stefano. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

It turns out, though, that the choreographer is just coming to grips with “space” through the complex tradition of Australia’s first peoples’ space-time maps – called “songlines”. Berretini’s approach is to recall the first peoples’ successful concept to support a dance experience of his movement-only theme: space.

His choreography gets at it first by visual separation then by encounter and group actions. In the opening movement, the artists, all dressed in light-sensitive pastel colors, enter the set together from a single off-center point.

I experience them as spreading over the set space like a (lapping) tide on a beach. The movement evokes the familiar defining contraries of “land, sea, horizon”, which also fills its now three dimensions with people. The set becomes a place.

With a music that minds its own business, establishing presence within a diffusely lit place, spectators see the artists variously as in one of three of five possible colors – blue, yellow, rose, green, orange – as they encounter one another, establish a flow of meeting, take on personality, individuate. And just in case a spectator is getting into a rut: a sudden rain of helium-filled rocks/meteors/turds/chocolate truffles from “above”.  Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, the spectator, a stimulating experience of the imagination of space.

With an intention to show dance as “a happy accident”, and keeping in mind that it must take a great deal of doing, Michele Di Stefano’s Sierras: Danses atmosphériques goes at the perception of space, too, but as “ambiance”. The challenge for Sierras’ artists is to figure spectators mountains that move spectators, or, perhaps, spectators moving figurative mountains, or both – in short, something that exists only in a body’s perception.

Di Stefano succeeds his dance with a choreography articulating around appearance and disappearance, along with continuous shading of light and (movement) energy.

In a first movement, Sierras’ intent artists, costumed in black and flesh,  pass in and out of the set space, then flow into and against each other within it, find distances, measures, relationships, limits.

As with Songlines, music that minds its own business backgrounds Sierra’s dim but changing light and tints and, especially, the artist movement. A unique red individual – a sun? – finishes a the unique and autonomous rhythm that now defines the place …  And, step right up, spectator! Experience space as place as its ambiance, its feeling, space that feels as real as a Mussorgsky Bald Mountain, a Hokusai Mount Fuji or a Richard Brautigan Big Sur! Lovely use of light, sound and movement and, for me, spectator, quite a new ambiance.

I’ll miss having Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine at the other end of my dance telescope.

______________

Articles discussing Jacobsson & Caley’s Ballet de Lorraine referenced above

Performing time present - Petter Jacobsson’s Ballet de Lorraine [by Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine Season 2022-23 #2: a tale of sentiment and feeling [by Tracy Danison]

“Dancefloor” and “Acid Gems” fit and knit movement energy together for Ballet de Lorraine [By Tracy Danison]

Ballet de Lorraine 2023-2024 performance calendar: Nancy, On Tour

François Lamargot on hybrid dance and the tragedy of the handicapped heart [By Tracy Danison]

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

Dance performer, choreographer and director François Lamargot says his recent “dance-theater” piece, J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie, comes down to his view that our civilization has generated a “handicap of the heart” that blinds its members to the destruction it (the handicap) provokes within and around it.

When Lamargot talks about a “handicap of the heart”, he means impaired hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and smelling of the here and now: non-development of the ordinary senses.  He thinks that when these ordinary powers are weak, the world within a body, the individual or personality, becomes a plaything of what Sting called “the poets, priests and politicians …. whose logic ties you up and rapes you”.

Without a within nourished from the ordinary senses, Lamargot thinks, a body loses herself or himself in a breathless spiral of passive reaction to the world without. Asked if J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie … is a study of the connections between us and the world or of our disconnection from it, Lamargot affirms, “Disconnection”. He says that, in the end, what he wants to suggest by showing the disconnection is that something other (than the handicapped heart and the madness) it produces is possible. He wants to get beyond discourse, to strain every sinew of theatrics, dance and multimedia to get across this other sensibility.

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

Son of a film projectionist and a stage actress, a neighborhood hip hopper with academic dance credentials, as a kid François Lamargot started acting with his mom at the now defunct Théâtre de Ménilmontant collective. He came to dance – classic, jazz and contemporary, with parallel specialties in break and house (freestyle personal expressive) – because he felt more at ease with his body. Also, he says, dancing makes him feel more able to express and show meaning.

Since his early days, Lamargot has created, performed, taught and encouraged dance performance in and from his native Paris 20ème to the Comoros Islands, from Lyon to Haiti and Gabon, from Marseille to New Caledonia.

Lamargot is intellectually and professionally in his element across the culture spectrum. He is as comfortable working on multidisciplinary career development with young people at the Jeune Ballet Européen as he is doing tailor-made creation for the reference hip-hop festivals Kalypso and Karavel.  Ethics and right action in daily life are important to Lamargot. His reference points include the principles of Taoism and the practice of the antique Zen masters Dôgen and Lin-Tsi along with the outlook of the writer Marguerite Duras and the precepts of the Argentine painter Luis Ansa and the contemporary social activist Henri Gougaud.

So, how does Lamargot get all his life experience and philosophy into a dance performance?

First off, by imagining then executing a form of dance. When I saw a first-draft production of J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … at the Théâtre National de la Danse (Palais du Chaillot) in 2022,  I thought of it as “cinematized dance-theater”, even as “musical drama”. I still think that’s a pretty understandable description.

Lamargot says that, taken together, what I could experience as “musical drama” is for him a distinct genre that hybridizes hip hop and specific elements of contemporary dance, especially danse contact (“contact improvisation” or “body empathy dance”).

In any case, he says he’s been instinctively looking for points of fusion among his different dance practices all along. “Movement has no genre frontiers”, he says, adding that there is, anyhow, a lot of complementarity in dance performance figures and forms. For instance, [the foot-fluttering movement called] petite batterie in classical dance “has a rhythm that closely resembles that in house dance…”

“J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie” by François Lamargot. Photo © Julie Cherki

These days, in any case, Lamargot doesn’t think much about the originating genre of a move or figure. He prefers to think in terms of a movement’s visual quality: “roundness, fluidity, impact, density, amplitude, explosiveness” and a movement’s effect on the spectator. 

J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … figures both dream and reality – a doubling that mobilizes Lamargot’s whole performance toolbox in the service of “showing” this sensibility of “disconnection” while holding out the possibility for another way of living.

The piece is played out on a set that recalls the feeling one has at the Palais de Glace, Baroque elegance that has lost its cultural moorings, is sliding toward hopeless forgotten-ness. What counts from there, he says, is, especially, theatricality and the astute use of video.

On set, video “translates as a mirror in which a given character also exists”.

As a genre, Lamargot observes, hip hop is powerful theatrical tool … “very forward, very much on the attack, very effective visually”. It often uses, he continues, set-piece situations to induce emotions in characters. These emotions can then be picked up by spectators as “sensibility” rather than as “story-line”.

Forms and riffs of contemporary dance provide attitude. For J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie,Lamargot is thinking in particular of danse contact. Dance contact operates around the receptive body, the body connected to its world. In the performers on stage this receptiveness, as in t’ai chi or karate, translates as strength and potentiality rather than power and action…

In the Paris region, you can catch J̵e̵ t̵’a̵i̵m̵e̵ … à la folie:

- 3 and 4 February 2024 at the Suresnes Cités Danse festival

Want to be among the world’s first certified choreographers? Check out La Fabrique de la Danse [By Tracy Danison]

Théophile Bensusan (l.), creation entrepreneur, dance performer, La Fabrique de la Danse, Paris. Photo © Emmanuelle Stäuble

“Orianne Vilmer has energy”. That’s what comes to mind as I am sitting down for the chat. Maybe it’s just that her name reminds me of the excellent Oriana Fallacci, interviewer of almost all the egregious men-of-power of the 20^th century. Like Fallacci, Vilmer’s radiates that kind of natural-born energy and wit old Father William in the Lewis Carroll nursery rhyme has. I have the feeling that, if she chooses, like the unsinkable father, she can successfully clarify a quantum paradox with a bon mot while idly balancing an eel on the tip of her nose.

Indeed, there are proofs that Vilmer does have her wits about her and is, in fact, as energetic, cultivated, and capable as my first impression suggests.

After all, I am talking to her because she’s the co-founder and guiding spirit – along with the veteran choreographer and dancer Christine Bastin – of La Fabrique de la Danse (“The Dance Factory”), a Paris dance school with a unique learning proposition.

For instance, as of this writing, as far as either La Fabrique, or I, can determine, the school is the only one in Paris, in the whole world, where you can learn the ins and outs of the choreographer’s métier and get official certification for it. That’s because, as of July, France’s national skills and competences register, Répertoire national des certifications professionnelles, RNCP, has included those required in a choreographer. La Fabrique is the institution with a curriculum that meets the requirements.

 

© La Fabrique de la Danse

 

I think it’s safe to say that Vilmer is a dance performer with a scientific background and serious business experience rather than some other way around.

In her school years, she took up classic dance and earned praise and prizes for it. Then, at the Paris Conservatory, she practiced contemporary dance for two years under the eyes of teachers such as Peter Goss, Joëlle Mazet and Susan Alexander.

She then turned away from dance training to prepare for life widely, taking degrees in engineering and mathematics – France’s educative equivalents of, say, in US terms, Harvard law with a stint in a graduate school of politics. She followed on with work in international corporate management, where, among other things, she contributed proudly and personally, she says, to ESG charter projects.

While in the corporate web Vilmer successfully kept up her dance. In fact, in a recent conversation with Christine Bastin, the latter went out of her way more than once to emphasize that Vilmer is a talented dance performer and choreographer. Indeed, in December, she’ll premier M51, a dance performance for 54 persons (in which she will perform), co-written with La Fabrique associate Emmanuelle Simon, with a digital scene by Damien Serban and original music by Baptiste Lagrave. As I say, energy, wit.

In 2010, Vilmer founded the amateur dance troupe Danse en Seine, whose stated mission is to “re-invent” the concept of amateur dance and dream “ambitious dreams”. In 2013, the troupe wanted to perform Gueule de Loup (“Wolf’s Maw”), Christine Bastin’s dance performance for five created for the 1992 Lyon Biennale de la danse.

That meeting seems to have been one of minds. In 2015, Vilmer and Bastin set up La Fabrique. Vilmer became president, using her energy wit and experience to do the necessary entrepreneurship and general management. Bastin became artistic director, contributing her choreography skills and experience to building and refining the school’s unique offering.

The idea of La Fabrique then, as now, was/is to turn out a “finished product”, a skilled dance performer, surely, but also a competent and efficacious creator.

It turns out that, as in many other contemporary endeavors, say, independent journalism or scriptwriting, creativity is not sufficient to a dance performer’s professional success. A body has to produce, too: administrate, manage and communicate.

When she speaks of educational goals, Vilmer says La Fabrique looks to train up “creation entrepreneurs”. She insists on, underlines, emphasizes the word “entrepreneur” as opposed to “manager”). She then describes La Fabrique as a “choreography incubator”, saying the heart of dance performance is “creation, a process very much personal to the creator, that needs to find nourishment and support from the outside” …

In other words, in choreography, it’s not just fulfilled intentions and figures that lead to success but also, as in other undertakings, people, lights, sound, stage and box office! So, even the most inner-directed dance performance auteurneeds to develop the arts of the entrepreneur: finding the resources and gaining support of others for the dance project.

A successful choreographer, Vilmer says, is a dance performance auteur who understands how to be an entrepreneur of dance creation. That’s why La Fabrique’s certification cursus aims to package it as training in “creation entrepreneurship”: understanding better how a dance performer creates, how they identify and analyze their needs and seek out the aids and supports that enable choreographic production ...  

… Why. Yes. I think so, too.

Orianne Vilmer and her La Fabrique de la Danse certainly do offer a real learning opportunity.

The pre-requisites and conditions of La Fabrique’s choreography cursus are analogous to a continuing-education MBA. For detailed information, click Fabrique de la Danse or call Ilyana Koura, the school’s personal development coordinator, during business hours (GMT+1) at (+33) 184 79 4534.

For more information on the professional status of choreographers, contact Chorégraphes Associé.e.s., France’s choreographer’s union

Figuring liberation: Margaux Amoros’ “À Cru” [By Tracy Danison]

“À Cru” dance performance by Margaux Amoros. Photo © Isabelle Chemin

… Ton message à la Grande Ourse/Et la trajectoire de la course/Un instantané de velours…

    - Noir Désir, “Le Vent Nous Portera”

I’m on the mailing list for a project called Pour un atlas des figures, (“For an atlas of figures and we don’t mean just dance steps”).

Pour un atlas is run by a movement arts scholar called Mathieu Bouvier and presents itself as tracing “the meander of lines around the radiant notion of ‘figure’, a notion at the meeting point of the philosophy of art, cultural anthropology, clinical and artistic creation”.

When a body mulls that over, it works. Although, until the other day, I used to think an atlas of figures was an absurd idea, an impossibility. To my mind, an atlas was just too physical-rational a notion and figuration and figuring a figure are just too complex and too personal to trace out and distill into the five basic steps of a YouTube tutorial.

But of course, Bouvier never suggested any such thing. I’ve just had the wrong idea. As Bouvier declares, figuration and the figure are a radiant notion and their atlas is the paths and byways from where and by which their un-narrative might be grasped or grokked.   

Pour un atlas and these considerations came to my mind the other day because I got a notice for Pour an atlas in my email and because I had just experienced, and enjoyed, too, the dance performance À Cru (“Raw”) by Margaux Amoros.

A Cru, a duo featuring herself and peer performer Jeanne Alechinsky, turned out, for me, at least, to be “all about” figure, figuring and figuration, showing them to exist in the time of an intentional, but un-narrative movement, as quantum, not as evanescent.

Amoros’ intention was:

Ayant fait le constat sans appel de leur domestication avancée, deux femmes décident de partir en quête de ce qui en elles résiste encore. «  Qui sont-elles sous les vieilles peaux mortes de leur subordination ? À quoi ressemblent-elles quand leur image se met à trembler de l’intérieur ? » Dans un espace hanté par la présence d'un musicien, elles viennent écouter la nécessité de faire alliance avec une sensualité indisciplinée. / Having understood their state of advanced domestication, two women decide to explore themselves to find that part of themselves that still resists. “Who are they under the dead skin of their subordination? What are they like when the image of themselves quakes from the inside?” In a space haunted by the presence of a musician, they listen to the need to ally themselves with a sensuality without bounds.

Here’s what I (believe I) heard and saw happen with À Cru:

A live guitar in a stage left catwalk is doing broad chords with plenty of dash and wah-wah; throughout sound rather follows or accompanies than leads movement. On stage, two women with what good old Anthony Trollope called “womanly” bodies; at center stage, clothed as womanly women, they are hand-in-hand for movements that range from jerky to moon-walky through to carefully experimental to smoother, stretchy, confident gesture.

At the point at which each of the womanly women seems to descry a distinct/defined individual dance, they loose hands to evolve in parallel.

One plants her feet and focuses her movement and emotion on her thrust-up pubis; I think of a samurai: her clitoris and upper vulva seemingly bulging, her posture and look, a “universal” figuring of “power”, “empowered”. Meanwhile, the other woman, referencing her partner by the contrast of movement, figuring her personal balance, showing herself within herself her body elegance: she stretches her limbs, projects a figuration of the place and sense of each bone and muscle within its whole.

The result is a broad figuration of the two women together gels in my eye – they share an evolved interior or exterior?

“À Cru” dance performance by Margaux Amoros. Photo © Isabelle Chemin

The duo passes into a movement of contact … In this contact, they are not so much mirrors as searcher-outers of one-another, experiencing found contact. For me, at least, the piece ends inside this crescendo of contact, without denouement:  once liberated, a body lives free, not so?

Back to Pour un atlas.

Figures, by my lights as now seen through À Cru, must necessarily be the collective biography of people figuring and figured. The figuration within that biography recreates the tissue of being-there-with, or the “un-narrative” experience, that enables the sensibility that in turn enables a spectator to enter into Imagination or, as we may say, be sensible of the quantum space a body actually inhabits.

An analogy to what I am thinking of here as “figuration” could be the visual experience of those mummy portraits from Roman Egypt, stimuli that shove the viewer into a “non-past”, say, one peopled with ineffable eternally extant personalities instead of into the “historical (or narrative) past” where each personality has some sort of role in “what happens ‘next’”.

And though Dance is the art that builds, carries and enables figuration, there are webs and webs of it in figuring ordinary life.

I am on the Pour un atlas mailing list because – well before I experienced Margaux Amoros’ À Cru and felt the force of her mastery of figuration – because of my admiration for any people who have understood that dance is the primary art. Loïc Touzé figures among very many admirable contributors of Pour un atlas; I have been in love with Touzé through my experience of his talk-memory dance, Je suis lent (“I am slow”). In my memory, for the record, the Lent I was there with rolls out in a place that photo evidence shows not to be that place or even the time of year or year of its production.  All the same, it figures true.

And what is this “love” if not a figuration of daily living, a web in a web of un-sayable figure, figuring and figuration?

Without any intention, by some ordinary quantum symbiosis or another, Touzé’s Lent figures my karmic Patronus. That is, the Down syndrome boy, strong back and sweet temper, for the term of natural life, bound hand, heart and foot to an aging industrial dishwasher. Most everybody who gets a glimpse of the bound figure are figuring it as all for the best. And that holds the bound boy down, ‘though, from time to time, a body with doubts briefly glimmers through the steam and clatter, bucking the bound boy up.

I’ve been figuring the bound boy figuration for years. He has washed many dishes for me and never said a word. Go figure.

_____________________

“À Cru” is Margaux Amoros’ first choreography, a duo It played at the Etoile du nord as part of the “Avis des turbulences” new works program. I saw it on 28 September 2023.

What is dance, what has it got to do with us and why? [By Pauline Tremblay]

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Introduction

Some years ago, I was in the habit of going to weekly public presentations on psychoanalysis. I would lose myself an hour or two in the rococo webs of a presenter’s case study, which they would lard with literary logics backed by vocal dramatics. It was an entertaining and instructive way to learn about contemporary psychoanalysis. Also, I would often hear some word or notion that would give me pause and, more than once, even make me sit up wide-eyed.

I was reminded of these experiences by Pauline Tremblay’s satirical slide-presentation performance piece, Corps social, corps dansant. The basic shtick of it is Tremblay’s presenter marching determinedly into recondite research only to wander off into an increasingly impatient detachment from the over-complex talk-talk, thus mirroring the general experience of too many real-life slide presentations. I chuckled and snickered, even guffawed, through Tremblay’s fine performance of a well-written and pretty spot-on satire.

But, from the moment the presenter explains her sense of what dance is and what it has to do with us and why – that is, almost from the very beginning of the performance –  I had a sit-up-wide-eyed experience. In my mind’s eye, a figure of a “porous self”, a self that is a vague outline set into an infinite overlap of an infinite number of porous “self-defining” outlines set against a vast coherence of being there with. It kept me sitting thoughtfully in my seat after the performance wound up, perched on my shoulder, whispered in my ear, as I rode my bike homewards.

In the text, there’s no trace of the figure of the "porous self" I describe just above.

Just after the short biography is an extract from the notes Pauline Tremblay used as both prop and script during her performance of Corps social, corps dansant, 28 September 2023, as part of Étoile du nord’s Autumn festival, Avis de turbulences. A translation into English follows Tremblay’s original text. 

Pauline Tremblay, dancer, performer, writer

With a consistent slant towards the off-beat, Pauline Tremblay’s creations straddle the frontier between performance, theater and dance, as well as between fact and fiction, the private and the public, between word and deed. Working as a dancer and performer since 2008, Tremblay trained in classical dance at Nantes and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in philosophy, esthetics, dance theory and therapy from the University of Paris 8, haut lieu of France’s post-modernist theory and analysis. Tremblay became an associate of the Gaëlle Bourges dance performance company in 2018. In addition to Corps Social, Corps Dansant, Tremblay’s recent creations include the dance performances One two One Two and Après alien. A new production tentatively entitled Trio pour une danseuse, une électroacousticienne et un.e batteur.se will see the stage in 2024. – Tracy Danison

 

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Corps social, corps dansant – Pauline Tremblay

… 2) LE CORPS DANSANT

« Dans un premier temps, de quelle danse parle-t-on ? Danse dite « primitive », « traditionnelle », « folklorique », « danse de couple », « danse moderne », « danse contemporaine », « danse de création » ... ? Et d’ailleurs, sont-elles si éloignées dans leurs approches du corps ?
L’histoire de la danse nous enseigne que c’est à partir du moment où la danse a pris conscience de sa dimension sociale et politique, c'est-à-dire que c'est à partir du moment où le corps dansant ne se résume pas aux différentes figures que traverse le danseur, qu’elle a tissé des liens avec son époque et que la danse a véritablement fait sa place parmi les autres arts.

1. Une place particulière au sein des arts

En effet, La danse est un art particulier qui ne peut dissocier le sujet de son objet :
Le danseur ne peut pas poser sa danse à côté de lui et la contempler. Le danseur fait coïncider une image intérieure, une sensation intérieure avec le regard extérieur. Et la danse émerge alors dans cet espace intermédiaire. Ainsi, autant dans sa production que dans sa réception, elle ne peut pas être en dehors du regard que l’on porte sur elle. Le corps dansant serait donc un catalyseur du corps social, du corps politique et potentiellement du corps institutionnel. Et sans doute l’art le plus à même de l’évoquer, d’en dire quelque chose.

Deux axes d'observation se dessinent : on peut se placer soit du point de vue de ce que la danse peut représenter symboliquement sur une scène en terme d’idéologie, soit du point de vue ce qu’elle comporte d’effet immédiat de par sa puissance de mobilisation kinesthésique.
Ce qu'on entend par kinesthésique  : c’est le pouvoir empathique, la façon dont chacun perçoit, en lui, par un processus de transfert et d’identification très fort, le mouvement de l’autre. Ce n'est pas du tout mystique ce que je suis en train de dire : cela a pu notamment être mis en évidence par la preuve de l'existence de neurones miroirs.

1. Le corps dansant = Le corps dansant et le corps regardant la danse“

• Le corps qui danse

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Qu’en est-il du corps dansant ? Est-ce que, parce qu’il est dansant, ce corps échappe à la contrainte sociale ? Ou est-ce une utopie ?
Le corps dansant est pris dans une dialectique de libération et de prise de pouvoir du corps social sur lui. La danse est un formidable moyen de libération individuelle et collective autant qu’un moyen de coercition individuel et collectif. 

• Avant d’être considérés comme des instruments performants, le mouvement et la danse déploient une spatialité, une temporalité, un imaginaire, des éprouvés conscients et inconscients, c’est à dire une subjectivité. Certes.
• Mais ce corps, qui cherche à s’émanciper de sa condition de base, en déjouant la gravité par exemple, s'engage bien dans une performance technique, dans la recherche d'une certaine virtuosité qui implique une maîtrise, voire un quasi dressage, du corps naturel. Donc il y a bien une dimension productiviste du corps dansant, qui implique une dépense d’énergie, un effort, un travail….
• Le corps qui regarde le corps qui danse. Comme on l’a dit, la danse est aussi indissociable de son évènementialité.Porter la danse au regard de l’autre c’est donc l’inscrire dans un espace social, public, collectif, politique. Elle pose d’emblée la question du regard du public …

Mais de quel public parle-ton?

S’agit-il d’une identité sociale, bourgeoise ou populaire ? Le spectacle instaure-t-il une entité, une communauté, un être-ensemble, une communion au sein des spectateurs ? Le lieu de la représentation devient-il un lieu de recueillement, de rassemblement, à construire ou à détruire d'ailleurs ? Ou le public reste-t-il une masse hétérogène d’individus éparses ? Avec comme seul dénominateur commun le fait d’être enfermé ici et maintenant ? "

“Corps social Corps dansant”, Pauline Tremblay. Photo © Mireille Huguet

Translation

Corps social, corps dansant by Pauline Tremblay

… 2) THE BODY AT DANCE

First off, what dance are we talking about? “Primitive” dance, “traditional” dance, “folklore” dance, “couple” dance, “modern”, “contemporary”, “original” dance? And at that, are these so far from each other in their approach to the body?

The history of dance tells us that, from the moment when dance becomes conscious of its social and political dimension, that is, from the moment when the body at dance cannot be described by the different figures through which the dancer passes, it has become part of its time and that it has made itself a real place among the other arts.

1. A special place among the arts

Dance is an art that cannot dissociate subject from object: The dancer cannot put their dance on the floor next to them to contemplate it. The dancer aligns an interior image, an interior feeling with exterior view. And it is from the intermediate space that the alignment creates that dance emerges. Thus, as much in its production as in its reception, dance cannot exist outside its exterior perception. The body at dance, thus, is a catalyst for the body in society, the body in politics and, potentially, of the institutional body. And, doubtless, dance is the art the best placed to point to, also to comment, the body,

Two ways of looking at the body at dance emerge. We may take the point of view of either what dance may represent symbolically in a context in terms of ideology or the point of view of what dance has of immediate effect through the power of kinesthetic mobilization.

What is meant here by “kinesthetic” is empathic capacity, that is, the way in which each perceives within them self, through the very strong transfer and identification process, the movement of the other. What Is meant here has nothing of the mystical; we could easily demonstrate the validity of the process described by pointing to the existence of mirror neurons.

1. The Body at dance = the dancing body + the body looking at the dance

• The dancing body

What about the dancing body? Does it escape from social constraints because it is dancing? Or is this a fantasy?

The dancing body operates as a dialectic of liberation from and submission to the forms of body in society. Dance is as formidable a means of personal and collective liberation as it of personal and collective coercion.

• Before they can be tools, movement and dance must deploy spatial, temporal and perceptual contexts, conscious and unconscious proofs, that is, subjectivity.
• But the body, which looks to emancipate itself from its primal state by, for example, defying gravity, engages with performance technique in the search for a certain virtuosity, which implies mastery, even near domination, of the natural body. There is, thus, a productivist dimension to the dancing body, which implies, after all, energy, effort, work…
• The body that looks on the dancing body.

As has been said, dance cannot be separated from its context. Bringing dance to a spectator is to put dance into public, social, collective and political space. Off the bat it poses the question of public perception…

But what public are we talking about?

Are we talking about a bourgeois or working class social identity? Does dance performance install an entity, a community, being-together, a communion in spectators? Does the performance space become a space for mediation, for gathering; also, is it to construct or demolish? Or do spectators remain a heterogeneous mass of scattered individuals with the sole common denominator being to be shut in together in a particular here and now? – Tracy Danison

NEMO Paris: what’s up with digital art? [By Tracy Danison]

“Play with the Earth”. NeoConsortium's “ExoForm”, the first sidereal art project, will eventually cover the whole world in breathtaking pink glass. In the end, spokespeople enthuse, all humanity will get to see this weary old planet through rose-colored glasses. Photo © Quentin Chevrier/Biennale Némo 2023

25 years and my life is still/Tryin' to get up that great big hill of hope…And I, I am feeling a little peculiar … And I scream from the top of my lungs, "What's going on?"

What's Up, 4 Non Blondes, 1993

Je est un autre (Arthur Rimbaud: ”I is an other”) is NEMO’s theme this year: a broad reflection on the power of digital technologies to shape web users into avatars, creating autonomous, alternative ”digital personalities” and, as Lana Del Ray sings, “blurring the real and the fake”. NEMO is the Paris regional digital creation show, which opened 1 October at the Centquatre Paris arts center.

What struck me most strongly in this first part of this season-long and region-wide program of exhibitions, performance and activities, is an emphasis on the under-discussed, under-regulated manipulative propensities of the technology and systems that underpin the web, its doings and its dones.  But after all, unless you count non-fungible tokens – deliberated rarity – as art, there really is no such thing as ”digital art”. So, if it’s not for art’s sake what’s all this digital fascination, beauty and amusement in favor of?

It’s the acknowledgement of the question that makes NEMO worth seeing.

The curators know that digital technologies are mediums, the 21st Century equivalents of paint, paintbrushes, chisels and stone, not artistic content. As to the messages of these mediums, it’s most often very sophisticated, rather unscrupulous and, often, sinister sales and marketing bushwa sold in depouillé-design, small, shiny machines, metal cigarette packs.

When there is some genuine artistic content of digital-contained technology, it is some rigid arrangement of a or some algorithm(s) of visuals and/or sounds and plane geometries around infinite lines, trompe l’oeil boxes and cylinders) of previously recorded creation or the mediated projection of organics (humans doing monkeyshines). This is then spit into the eye in the form of fun-house style figures or multiple simulacra. The simulacra is inevitably worked up to enhance its attractive or manipulative effect on the human psyche. Usually both.

 

Marco Brambilla's “Heaven’s Gate”, a cascade of Hollywood. Photo © Marco Brambilla

Marco Brambilla’s huge, gorgeous Heaven’s Gate, for instance, is framed “to make reference to the Great Works of the Renaissance” and creates a ”life fresco” by repetitively serializing a cascade of previously-iconized Hollywood images (King Kong, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, etc., etc.). It’s art, surely, and I admit I stood there in front of it like a cat in the posture of ineffable longing, but I can’t say its digital art. It’s to note to that I walk away from Brambilla’s piece with a refreshed consciousness of brands and services and objects still under copyright.

On the other hand, it is less clear to me that Collectif Universal Everything’s Future You black box piece, which transforms then articulates then projects detected movement into line-and-ovoid figures, is art, digital or otherwise. Sure it’s an interesting artisanal object that can do interesting things, but, really, its content isn’t in the medium but in the talk-talk and palaver around its possibilities.

And, in terms of medium, message and content, the Brambilla and Universal Everything pieces are pretty much par for the course for “digital art”, the content or message is not wholly in the medium – those Hollywood images come from Hollywood, after all –  it’s mostly along-side it: And mostly the discourse can be summed up as an Ivana-Trump-equivalent simulacrum personalized to sell you on it.

As a physical experience, art done with digital technology gives the spectator a feeling without providing a physical referent for it. Maxime Houot’s Ataraxie fascinating laser-spurting cylinder is a good example. The scenic frame is pure space-movie, it makes you dizzy with psycho-perceptive trickery; I find myself grabbing on to Karine, solid as a rock, as usual, standing next to me.

 

In Bill Vorn’s bright digital future, even clunkier robots will have an I.C.U. Photo © Bill Vorn

And, whether we’re talking about art or not, the angle of entry into the digital space is mostly visual, although sound can be also.

Art and every other intentional content in the digital space manipulates certain flicker and, sometimes, vibration according to the rules of our perceptive faculties to enable experience.

But this doesn’t mean the non-manifested flicker and vibration disappear. They don't.

As strobe-sensitive people, folks with epilepsy and virtually anybody who is psychically borderline will tell you, in the digital space that flicker and vibration affect the brain in the same way that second-hand cigarette smoke affects the lungs. That’s why a day on the computer so wears a body out!

Line’s a little fuzzy, voices a little woolly, but all in all, it's good. “TribuT” by Jean-Luc Cornec. Photo © Quentin Chevrier Biennale Némo 2023

Nobody actually knows the effects of flicker exposure are.

There’s no doubt in my mind that, in combination with a cultural predisposition to paranoia and sales and marketing oriented algorithms, flicker, in particular, makes digital space a priori poison space.

And let’s note that, despite the huge role of flicker (and electronic wave and vibration) in human perception, studies are rather few and limited in scope. And this although since Western Antiquity, at least, people know about light and stillness on wellbeing.

Anyhow, a stroll through NEMO’s CentQuatre offer is a mind-teasing pleasure.

Curators have mobilized nearly 50 highly-skilled, thoughtful individuals and collectives to design, build and perform a whole range of installations, scenarios and choreographies from across Europe and North America.

Featured creators and creative enterprises include:

Donatien Aubert,
Tatsuru Arai, Charles Ayats & Vincent Dupont, Marco Brambilla,
Hasley Burgund & Francesca Panetta, France Cadet,
Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis,
Evian Christ,
Chen Chu-Yin & Daphné Le Sergent Collectif Impatience,
Robbie Cooper,
Jean-Luc Cornec,
Dos à deux,
Encor Studio,
Mathieu Gafsou,
Cristina Galán,
Frederik Heyman,
Maxime Houot,
Montaine Jean,
Stéphane Kozik,
Joris Lacoste & Hyoid,
Fabien Léaustic,
Aloïs Leclet
Tryphème & Ulysse Lefort,
Julien Loutelier & Axel Rigaud, Ariane Loze,
Adrien M & Claire B,
Émilie Anna Maillet, Wayne McGregor,
Meuko! Meuko!,
NeoConsortium,
Obvious,
Clare Poolman,
Christian Rizzo,
Jeanne Rocher,
Ian Spriggs,
TS/CN (Valentin Fayaud & Nicolas Michel),
Universal Everything,
Emmanuel Van der Auwera,
La Vaste Entreprise,
Franck Vigroux & Antoine Schmitt, Tatiana Vilela, Dos Santos,
Bill Vorn,
Cecilie Waagner Falkenstrøm, Etta Marthe Wunsch,
Xenoangel and
Zone critique


Click here for the list of installations and other programming.

Something like opera on a rocket ship: creating for space that talks back [By Tracy Danison]

Luara Raio’s “Apocalypso”, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia. Photo © Rachel Pimentel

A couple of years back I wrote about the challenge of art performance – Deploying original intentions and creative potential – at Lafayette Anticipations, the well-known visual and performance art venue in Paris’ Marais district.

All Lafayette’s installations and performances happen within what is, essentially, an elaborate sculpture of space by architect Rem Koolhaas. Basically, Lafayette is a large three-layer light well with viewing platforms.

If you’ve lived in a flatiron or a round building or had to renovate “atypical space” to live in, experience or instinct gives you some measure of Lafayette’s ongoing technical and esthetic challenge, interesting in itself. More broadly, whether doing dance performance or living life, the space it takes place in is a primordial feature of it; we are in an existential exchange with our surroundings.

A space can be mute: choreography that works fine in somebody’s basement won’t necessarily work at Opéra Bastille. A space can talk back: current life choreographies are transforming the natural environment from an indifferent ally into an existential threat.

Mute or responsive, exchange with space is an existential imposition. But both authentic living and art require will and intention, so finding a way to dialogue, deliberately shaping and grafting intentions into given space, is essential to creative success. Because Lafayette’s “space sculpture” has so much relentless will and intention built into it – Rem Koolhaas is always talking back –  it forces a spectator – at least, it has always forced me – to think hard about how a creator/choreographer/performer achieves dialogue from exchange.

Ivan Cheng. In situ. Photo Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations © Timboli

So far, whether for installations or performance, Lafayette’s three-layer light well sculpture has been made to work pretty well. For instance, both as experience and brain-teaser, the articulation of light and dark for Agnes Gryczkowska’s Spring 2023 installation, Au-Delà: Rituels pour un monde nouveau, (“There Beyond: rituals for a new world”), modeled as an “initiation” evoking archaic, contemporary and future ritual, did the trick very well. And the space positively threw itself into its role as a big city pocket park for performance creator Lina Lapelyte’s The Mutes.

Strong choreographers at Lafayette can and do create dialogue through force of artistic intention. I’m thinking of Noé Soulier’s Mouvement sur Mouvement. Strong performers can and do master the space with a performance that creates a parallel space, resonating like an opera in a rocket ship. I’m thinking of Dorothée Munyaneza’s A cappella. Both performances featured in Echelle Humaine 2022.

At moments, too, Lafayette’s space can make for wonderful, one-of-a-kind success. My heart still beats hard when I think of watching dance performer Yuika Hashimoto’s re-creation of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s historic Violin Phase, which was followed by the choreographer’s de-creation of same at the bottom of that light well. Unforgettable stuff and only possible inside Koolhaas’ sculpture.

Essentially, Echelle Humaine 2023, which opens this Friday, 15 September, is challenging all its dance performance and installation creators to work deliberately within its unique performance space. Using public workshops, creator meet & greets, installations and choreographies, it has explicitly built its program around how that is, or can be, done.

The program is heavy on visualness and concepts. Installations include Alix Boillot’s Scénographie potentielle, a blue potato that inhabits it’s given space at the top of the light well and Tai Shani’s Reading room, which accents (her) recurring motifs. Ivan Cheng’s Clarities, is a purpose-built active installation-performance using video to satirize the creative process,  Luara Raio’s Apocalypso, featuring Acauã El Bandide Sereia, and Paul Maheke’s  L'Origine de la mort, featuring Alyssa "Ledet" Dillard, are both dance-performance duets, the former themed around cultural colonization and the latter around on the thinness of the lines between perceptions.

So let’s see how the challenge is met.

Quantum foam washes over Théâtre de la Bastille: waiting on g-2 results [by Tracy Danison]

Betty Tchmonga, “Mascarades”. Photo © Queila Fernandez

Our way to measure or perceive things changes from day to day, so naturally things change even if we can’t, don’t want to, or have senses and capacities inadequate to talk about what is happening:

 Muon g-2 experiment reinforces surprise result, setting up physics ‘showdown’ The difference of g from 2 — or g minus 2 — can be attributed to the muon’s interactions with particles in a quantum foam that surrounds it. These particles blink in and out of existence and, like subatomic “dance partners,” grab the muon’s “hand”, changing the way the muon interacts with the magnetic field. The Standard Model incorporates all known “dance partner” particles and predicts how the quantum foam changes g. But there might be more. Physicists are excited about the possible existence of as-yet-undiscovered particles that contribute to the value of g-2 and would open the window to exploring new physics. - uchicagonews, 11 August 2023

Muons and measures and the cosmic randomness of dance partners is at least part of what was behind my post, Psst! Are you listening, “New York Times” Letters page? Playwright Nathalie Béasse wins “Beyond Words Values” award. It’s a big deal. For me, Nathalie Béasse’s theater represents a shift away from narrative theater towards performance theater: like visual art, pointing towards sense rather than story.

The shift may have come about as a result of Béasse’s beginnings as a visual artist combined with a remarkable native insight into the physical mechanics of psychology.

However it may actually be for Béasse, sense, or Imagination, is what I think Dance, capital D, is all about, so I think the public success of her work is Sign and Portent of a developing un-narrative or performance way to do what we usually call theater.

The fascination with the un-narrative is the quantum foam shaping my optics on the noteworthy change of management at the Théâtre de la Bastille. Claire Dupont, 42, recognized as founder and director of Prémisses, especially for her work in developing performing arts through inclusion, has replaced Jean-Marie Hordé, 75, known for rescuing and then developing theater (live performance) culture, after better than 30 years of more than good theater and dance. With Dupont’s accession, Théâtre de la Bastille has also become publicly operated, part city of Paris and the region, part ministry of culture. Le Monde calls the appointment of Dupont “audacious”, but the 40-something’s professional career objectives and the government’s policy ends seem to me to dovetail famously. The ministry certainly saw that and saw, too, that her success thus far signals she’s serious about the future.

Nach, “Cellule”, Photo © Dainius Putinas

The change is noteworthy for me because of the g-2 element of it, as I say, but also because of a personal element. When I first came to France, I made it my business to see all the classic plays and all the then current ones I could. My aim was to get a handle on the society I was living in – that seemed to be one good way to go forward. My main but not only theaters of action were Comédie française, Théâtre de la Colline and Théâtre de la Bastille. After a performance of The Master & Margarita, I decided I’d had enough of theater, and of words words words in general; I’d got all the handle that was possible for me to get. I can say now that my life accomplishments so far include sitting through Racine’s oeuvre, seeing the Great Wall of China and realizing that Gorbatchev had really read Crime & Punishment. All that is no mean feat. And what comes next is of interest.

In addition to the personal, the management change at Bastille is significant in a couple of public and social ways. First, because generational; this Claire Dupont could be my own daughter; I might have been at school with Hordé; this change is happening everywhere and increasingly. Too, it’s significant as politics and public policy. In a country where culture is seen as the basis for social cohesion and not its result, it’s value in terms of inclusion and intégration will weigh more, maybe than its public esthetic success. And that esthetic success is what concerns me most.

So, what stands out to me from what I know this far is how clear and coherently Claire Dupont has been about her task of creating a framework for intelligent, popular, inclusive living performance. Her terms of art on paper just seem to make so much logical sense. Her plans for going forward, at least as I can make them out in her project description and season program, strike me as sensibly modest and well-paced.

First off, in the declarative, Dupont writes that her theater will use contemporary spoken French. This suggests two things: that she realizes that language as spoken by today’s creators is an accessory to performance and she’s serious about developing writing today.  Second, she’s declares that she’s introducing what she calls “parliamentary” artistic management. And so it is that her announced way of going about it shows she actually knows what “parliamentary” means: her MPs among them represent enough serious “lobbies”, skills, competences, experiences and general artistic sérieux to set up and staff an all-genre dance performance theater. Which is, I suppose, is the idea.

 

Cie De Hoe, “Le Nouvel Homme”. Photo © Koen Broos

From my reading between the lines, Dupont, among other things, has a particular care for people who know how to work with others and who learn the ropes of a project through experience of it.

Gurshad Shaheman, who arrived in France as a 12 year old refugee from Iran, trained as a Persian-French translator at Paris VIII, as well as an actor in a public-university associated regional acting school in Marseille. Shaheman has been working since 2004 in every conceivable aspect of live performance: performer, director, caberetist playwright; he has apparent intellectual and emotional heft on migrant and LGBTQ issues.

Agnés Mateus and Quim Tarrida come from Catalonia and are currently working together on the performance Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota (“Bounce, bounce: in your face”), themed around ordinary violence. Mateus trained as an actor and journalist and now calls herself a multidisciplinary artist. To begin her performance career, she joined Collectiu General Elèctrica at its founding in 1996. The mission of the Barcelona performance collective was to break the barriers between performance, theater and dance. Throughout her career, as she is now with Quim Tarrida, Agnès Mateus has worked in co-work and/or co-contribution projects. Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota is a second collaboration. Tarrida is a materials and visual artist who now defines himself as a performance artist.

Betty Tchomanga, whose constituency is Dance performance, was born in the west of France in 1989. Educated and trained in Bordeaux and Angers, Tchomanga has lately been having good success with public and critics alike. She seems at the beginning of an interesting maturity as a choreographer and performer after working with the exceptional choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas since 2014. Tchmonga strikes me as a creator whose concern is, on the model of the dance performer Dorothée Munyaneza, sensibility, creating atmosphere, reaching toward the sacred and spiritual in the material.

Bastille’s MPs will be on campaign in season 2023-2024, so spectators will get a sense of how they do creation as well as sit through performances the same artists have had a hand in choosing. In addition to the wide variety of performance habitually offered, spectators can savor Gurshad Shaheman’s Les Fortresses, featuring members of his own family; Agnés Mateus’ and Quim Tarrida’s Rebota, rebota y en tu cara explota, which explores the same ambient violence that Barbie reported during a recent visit to reality; Betty Tchomanga’s Mascarades, incarnating the energies of Mami Wata, voodoo earth mother.

In succeeding years, Dupont’s plan is, each artist will develop individual thematics or performance lines to follow.

In addition to Tchmonga’s Mascarades, the 2023-2024 season’s dance offer will figure dancer and choreographer  Laura Bachman, born 1994, veteran of the Paris Opéra and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Cie Rosas, doing Ne me touchez pas(“Don’t touch me”) a feminine duo. Mohamed Toukabri, born in Tunis in 1990, a street breaker from Belgium in the 2020s come to contemporary dance performance through Academie Internationale de danse in Paris and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S. program, performs The Power of the fragile, with his mother ; Nach (Anne-Marie Van), who came to dance in her 20s through Krump, the psychotherapeutic variant of break dance, on-the-hoof apprenticeship and just plain creative intelligence, has created her own take on contemporary dance (La Biennale de la danse du Val de Marne 2023 #2: I got that hip hop feeling [By Tracy Danison]. Her solo contribution is from 2017, the first of her work I saw : Cellule, around freedom in the body self.

The energy and the g-stuff are in place. Switch on the collider.

Click for complete Théâtre de la Bastille Performance Calendar 2023-2024

Click for Cie Nathalie Béasse Performance Calendar in France & Belgium 2023-2024

Amy Swanson: Keeping on keeping on, Duncan dancing and the Old Woman of Tiritaka [by Tracy Danison]

Dancer and choreographer Amy Swanson on the set for Mehdi Kerkouche’s Portrait at La Scala Provence, 15 July 2023. Photo © Kilian Vérin

So why do today’s troisième âge cohorts keep on, or at least try to, keep on dancing? After all, live performance is a very wearing profession. The needed energy, prowess and bravura often come with a heavy physical price; also, non man dance careers are often truncated by Barbie-related issues. When a dancer continues to perform, it’s more akin to a coal miner staying down the pit than, say, a manager staying on despite re-organization and old-guy buyout. There are a lot of reasons, some more intriguing than others.

In spite of the challenges, Amy Swanson, who began performing in 1975, has chosen to keep dancing. Co-founder (with her late husband, Alain Salmon) of the contemporary dance performance venue Regard du Cygne in Belleville and a long-time all-round facilitator of dance culture, Swanson has variously been a choreographer, performer and teacher in Paris since 1980. She retired from running Regard du Cygne a little better than a year ago.

It turns out that Swanson had been casting even as she was bowing out of her old role – getting asked to cast, actually, as I’ve heard – for a certain number of performance projects. She went with TV director, choreographer and actor Mehdi Kerkouche’s Portrait. Kerkouche was born in 1986.

Portrait, a Netflix-style pop-psy “family portrait” blasts onto the stage with high-energy hip-hop choreography. It has become a live performance hit since its début this past January. Swanson, a life-long “Duncan dancer”, is the piece’s presiding genius, the mother, of Portrait’s contemporary dysfunctional (or functionally dysfunctional) family. Beyond her role in the Portrait narrative, Amy Swanson’s emotionally evocative, fluid, dance performance is in strong contrast with the vigorous break riffs of her challenging and challenged rejetons, kids, grandkids, great grandkids.

Coal miner, indeed! To get to where she is (now looking at performing all over France right into 2024), not only did Swanson have to follow a grueling schedule of getting acquainted with the succeeding generation’s habits and outlook, working on the contemporary dance creation process as well as rehearsals, Swanson’s now been uncomplainingly performing non-stop since Portrait hit the boards.

In some sense, Swanson’s role as presiding genius in Portrait denotes what seems to be her reason for accepting to be where she is.

The “Old Woman” from the Tiritaka site on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. Screenshot from Adélise Lapier’s Facebook discussion of its interpretation

“Duncan dancing” seems to mean a lot of things to a lot of people, so I can only speak for myself and say that a Duncan dancer – like Duncan herself – in some way links dance with a “human essential” – women, ecology, the sacred. Swanson is certainly committed to all three examples. Given the link, she’d agree that dance performance by definition is a vocation or a calling, not a job you can just do – neither miner nor manager. But I don’t think we should put too fine a point on this – the dance performance “warhorses” of Jean-Christophe Bleton’s Bétes de Scène that I discussed in an earlier essay, surely see dance as their calling, as do many miners and managers, for that matter, without going further than that.

I think Swanson – and along with her many, many dance performers besides – are keeping on keeping on because as herself and as a Duncan dancer, she sees something “true” in dance, sees dance as the primal art. Practicing dance, sticking to dance performance through her own passages of life is an existential imperative, not only for herself as an individual person but for the rest of us.

Indeed, when I sent  Swanson a note asking her why she kept dancing, she sent me Adelise Lapier’s commentary on the rare and well-known female stone image found at the Tiritaka site on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and called the “Old Woman”. Lapier tries to un-mystify portrayals of women in history by applying a tad of Motel of the Mysteriesconsciousness to her analysis. Lapier says that contrary to what one is often led to believe, the Old Woman doesn’t represent an otherworldly “goddess” but a quite ordinary wise woman or sorceress or shaman.

Gentlemen! Lapier says the Old Woman’s perfunctory breasts are just a visual cue, a convention, not a sign of heavenly purpose. The old woman’s broad shoulders and big strong hands, on the other hand, tell us about the role of Old Woman in a traditional society. “This old one no longer has the worries of a woman who is young”, Lapier writes, “She … guides, she holds up the world…”.

Anybody who’s had children knows just exactly the essential work grandmothers do, so there’s no need to perorate on Lapier’s analysis.

When I put it to Swanson that dance now belongs to her in the same way that the makers of the Old Woman believed wisdom or magic power belonged to women in their troisième vie, she wrote, “Especially maybe as a Duncan dancer. I feel it nails what my job is on stage in this piece and what the [feedback] from the audience [has] been.”…

Apart from compliments for her dancing as good as just good dancing, she continues, some talked about “true dance”, not just her theatrical choreographic representation as a motherly representation in Kerkouche’s piece, but saw in her dancing something more: a dancing between worlds. …

“That is exactly what I feel like I’m doing [when I dance),” Swanson says, “Like I’m on a parallel universe... on a bridge permitting me to mingle with the others on the stage or to be ‘out there’”…

2023-2024 tour program for Mehdi Kerkouche’s hip dance performance hit “Portrait”

Dancing old: social statement, cultural reflection, market opportunity, sacred art [By Tracy Danison]

School kids, their adult helpers, parents and neighborhood picnickers doing the first performance of choreographer Laurence Bertagnol’s “Connexion 6: Création Instantanée et participative” dance project for the suburban city of Bagnolet, July 2023. Photo © Guillaume Ison, courtesy Ville de Bagnolet 

I wrote last September about GRICP, an intergenerational dance program put together by choreographers Jean Christophe Bleton and Laurence Bertagnol. Full disclosure: after interviewing the pair, I joined the group. I’ll do it again this year, not because I want to bop till I drop, but because

Good sense, innocence, cripplin' mankind/Dead kings, many things … clutter the mind –Strawberry Alarm Clock, 1967

Bleton and Bertagnol’s GRICP is a democratic project with a straightforward argument: since dance is primary human art, everybody should have access to it. Bleton and Bertagnol agree that there’s nothing special about dance among us codgers when compared with infants and the ruck of non codgers; dance performance is by nature inclusive: it belongs to its performer, not their social situation (BAP September 2022: Cie Les Orpailleurs: practicing the dangerous art of thought in muscle & blood, skin and bone).

Since talking with Bleton and Bertagnol, there seems to have been a spate of dance performance featuring performers entering what the French call le troisième âge – a dignified (and, by the way, non-chronological) way of referring to humans over 60.

What I’ve seen since the first of the year 2023 are two parts of a gender-blending triptych by Bleton (Ne Lachons Rien, the concluding piece, debuts in Paris in January 2024) along with Rachid Ouramdane’s Un jour nouveau, a short musical comedy nostalgia-style piece, accompanying Angelin Preljocaj’s and the remarkably talented Alterballetto troupe’s reflection on the social condition of the ageing and Portrait, Mehdi Kherkouche’s hip-hop-contemporary-dance performance as Netflix-style dysfunctional-family soap. These last were all at the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot last January and represent, along with Bleton’s triptych, pretty much the gamut of current approaches to aging in dance performance.

At least parts, if not the whole, of the interest in dancing codgers seems to me due to general post-Covid live dance performance effervescence. And also, there’s the sheer number of over-60s in good shape on both sides of the stage, so there are plenty of performers and, since we love nothing so much as studying our own selves, market opportunity.

But it may be that the real push towards featuring le troisième âge comes from the nature of Dance. Unlike narrative and sound and visual representation, Dance is, as Isadora Duncan knew when she revived it, the sacred art that joins our otherwise incoherent dust to universal flow, the marriage of Earth and Sky (BAP July 2023, Shards of Beauty: dust, stardust, sheep and wolves).

Shards of Beauty: dust, stardust, sheep and wolves [By Tracy Danison]

Château de Chambord, along the banks of the river Loire and one of the world's greatest shards of beauty, Photo: © Benh Lieu Song 

I’m a sucker for gravity waves, time gaps, colliding hadrons, unidentified anomalous vehicles, sheep peregrination and the Cloud Atlas Sextet – likely even to spot those clouds as I laze through a long warm evening along the river Loire, waving my wineglass and artistically complaining of my lumbago. No surprise, then, that I was attracted by a talk called Fragments de beauté : de la poussière du métro à la poussière d'étoile (“Shards of Beauty: from dust in the metro to stardust”). Shards is “Working Lecture #4” in the Université de Paris’ ongoing La Chaire Beauté lecture series. It was held the cozy, woody and damned hot Auditorium d’Honneur at the Beaux Arts.

One never knows in advance the knowledges to be plumbed or disgorged on an ordinary day.

At this Shards lecture, for instance, in addition to thoughtful discussion of perception, science and esthetics, I got a little insight into the obtuseness that was the 19^th century. Classy they may be, but wood mosaic panels have lousy acoustics: Clarwin you zay? Zex door? Buffalos? Charcuterie? Teutons? Where? – It’s all too easy to imagine the weight of all that misunderstanding hanging in the psychic air of August 1914.

But, as I always lend my ear hard, “as for detection of snakes”, as my father-in-law used to say, I grok Shards pretty well.

Flanked by a wonderful photo of one of visual artist Lionel Sabatté’s “dust wolf” sculptures, Yannick Mercoyrol, director of culture events at the chateau de Chambord – one of the world’s hoariest and grandest ancient dusty piles, a marvel of the marvelous river Loire –, mediated a discussion of the sense of “dust” by micro-meteorologist-chemist Cecile Engrandand Sabatté.

A wolf of dust, glue and iron wire by visual artist Lionel Sabatté guarding the central helical stairway at château de Chambord. Photo: Chambord 2023 © Leonard de Serres

Mercoyol reminded the audience of the traditional rhetorical use of “dust” as the dissociated husk of the soul – “dust to dust, ashes to ashes” – and pointed its contemporary iteration as primary material and/or point of departure for the world around. Engrand and Sabatté then went on to describe something like how “dust”, our way of saying “micro stuff”, shapes into “macro stuff” as worlds and as art.

Cécile Engrand studies the composition of the micrometeorites that daily rain on earth, notably, those found in Antarctica. She gave an overview, so to say, of how the Earth and the celestial corps general shape and have been shaped by the continuous accretions of particles that range from motes to comets. She highlighted the presence of carbon-hydrogen + compounds in this cosmic rain. Sabatté, meanwhile, recounted the debuts of a lifework highlighting the unshaped and un-shaping – dust and rust – as a lonely college-boy’s love affair with the dust-devils (moutons, they call ‘em here) in his tiny chambre de bonne.

The civilizational changeover from dust as metaphor for life’s end point to dust as life’s start point up above and here below, as cosmic rain and, especially, as perception of the material environment, has got me thinking about the frontier between the visible and invisible.

After all, the eye remains the fundamental measure of the world we see and the world we don’t. Not by accident, then, the measuring process involved in measure has become the great complexificator for plumbing and disgorging knowledges about the world we experience. Golly! Garçon! Another drink here along the banks of the Loire!

As to the idea of a rain of life from the cosmos, after listening a bit, my companion muttered, “Sploosh. Fish?” I am still not sure if she was kidding or succinctly commenting the Chain of Being.

Garçon! A drink for Madame!

Most of all, though, I am left thinking about the attraction of all towards all in the universe and the unsayable fire within, the movement that attracts us. “Attraction” is a pretty contrast to “struggle”, is it not?

Dreaming in the long evening here along the banks of a Loire studded with broken towers, chateaux now empty and restaurant cafés d’envergure, I cannot help wondering if Dance, capital D, is not the human shape of the attraction of all towards all…

Varieties of dance performance: trading a mess of pottage for sense and awareness [by Tracy Danison]

“The Game of Life”, sextet, 50 minutes. Creation 2022 by Liz Santoro, Pierre Godard, cie Le principe de l’incertitude and Jean-Yves Macé, cie l’Instant Donné. Le Carreau du Temple, June Events, 14 June 2023. Photo © Le Principe de l’incertitude – Liz Santoro

Look! On stage! Is it ballet? Is it Krump? Contemporary dance? No! It’s performance! More incomprehensible than Jacques Lacan! More innovative than Merce Cunningham! More compelling than Lucinda Childs. It’s, well, it’s… Well. What is it, then?

 

“Haut-Fond”, solo, 1h. Creation 2023 by Céline Cartillier cie Météores. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 8 June 2023. Photo © cie Météores - Céline Cartillier 

In a previous article in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words (June Events 2023 dance performance festival features variety, environment and sense experience) on Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program, I wrote that the festival was pushing aside genre for focus on the arts of movement: dance performance. I’m all for it. I love Dance, capital D, think it is existentially important, think putting folderol such as genre in the way of appreciating it is unproductive.

I argue that talk of “genre” or “dance” vs. “performance” might be okay if you’re talking about a widely-recognized and limited series of repeated body movements, social dance, such as a Waltz, the Twist, or a square dance, or for traditional dance-entertainments such as ballet, non-shamanic sword-dancing, or a TV chorus line. But otherwise such distinctions are not very helpful.

Talking about “dance performance” (performance that takes dance movement and experience beyond words (un-narrative) for its primary resource) makes better sense.

So, for me, in making no distinctions between dance and performance and pushing no traditional genres, June Events 2023 made a public declaration of better sense – and made better sense work in practice.

 

“BOW’T TRAIL Rétrospek”, trio, 1h15. Creation 2020 by Rhodnie Désir, RD Créations with live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium, June Events, 6 June 2023. Photo © Kevin Calixte

A June Events spectator could blindly stab a finger on the program and come up with a variety of dance performance forms. Stab once and find yourself whirling and turning about almost modernly with Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard’s The Game of Life. Stab again and find yourself enmeshed in what seems to be a personal identity story hour with Habib Ben Tanfous’ Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas (“Here I leave to you what doesn’t belong to me”).

Though the old labels are pointless, I can’t help thinking it might be helpful to have a way of talking about several pieces as an ensemble, to identify a thread that joins Ben Tanfous and Santoro’s pieces as similar works of “dance performance”. Once identified, might this thread not suggest a different, more useful way of talking about dance performance generally?

The first night of the program, I ran into Atelier director-programmer Anne Sauvage. She was offering white wine in the garden that makes going to the Atelier so pleasant. Instantly donning my social autism hat, I took the opportunity to ask her in the most involved way possible what was the unifying part in the different pieces in June Events’ repertory?

 

“Playlist612”, trio, 1h. Création 2018 by Daniel Larrieu Astrakan, Collection Daniel Larrieu. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 17 June 2023. Photo © Benjamin Favrat

Sauvage is thoughtful as well as patient, so some days later, she stopped me to say: sensibilité, citing Julien Andujar’s “performance” Tatiana and Aïna Alègre’s “contemporary dance” THIS IS NOT (an act of love and resistance).

Sensibilité mostly translates into contemporary English as “sensitivity to” or “feelings about”; Sauvage meant that the thread that unites the program’s different performances is the experience of the “‘sense in and awareness of’ the different type of relationship” that each of the pieces features in different ways.* Just coming out from Tatiana, as we were, we could agree that Andujar had deliberately explored and made us aware of the sense in a very deep, very intimate personal relationship otherwise impossible to fully state without. Such exploration is explicit in the stated intention of Alègre’s THIS IS NOT.  

So, whether the one focuses on “material”: air, breath and the other, on the “psychological”: absence, presence, both share a process, exploration, and a drive toward sense in and awareness of a particular thematic or a problematic.

 

"Fila Fila Manani", duo, 30 minutes. Creation 2023 by Tidiani N’Diaye, cie copier coller. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 15 June 2023. Photo © Atelier de Paris

Later, when I tried, I could evaluate all the June Events pieces I was and would be able to see inside a schema of “(choreographic) exploration, (spectator) sense-awareness and thematic”. It works fine. Through the lens of “relationship”, “performances” such Nina Santés’ solo tanning box exploration of beauty services and products, or Haut Fond, Céline Cartillier’s exploration of movement, clay and sound, Rhodnie Désir’s Bow’t Trail exploration of the slave routes or MOS, Ioanna Paraskevopoulou’s pas de deux on and over a TV set , for instance, sit easily alongside “dance” such as Daniel Larrieu’s Playlist612 choregraphic (re-)enactments with heirs, Joanna Schweizer’s dancing revisit of man and bird in Des Oiseaux, Pierre Godard and Liz Santoro’s joyful almost traditional take on John Horton Conway’s concept of cell division, The Game of Life or Mélissa Guex’ wrenching Down, an attempt to merge dancer and drummer. After all, the thing that changes among them is how the choreographer tries to bring the spectator with them to “sense and awareness” of the type of relationship involved.

 

“MOS”, duo, 45 minutes. Creation 2022 by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Onassis Stegi. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 17 June 2023. Photo © Pinelopi Gerasimou

However it might be, the schema sure beats trying to decide, first, if what I am watching adheres to some vague “dance or performance” conventions. Most important of all, I think, is that when I use it, I am thinking in terms of a choreographic process and its effect on me as a spectator, not asking to be entertained, not trying to figure out an embedded narrative or an authorial intention.

That, I think, is more likely to extend and refine my appreciation of Dance, capital D. That's important. So, as one of the 20th century's more serious philosophers to say, I'm going to "git on up!" and get down on it.

 

“Down”, duo, 25 minutes. Creation 2023 by Mélissa Guex, cie Sumo. Atelier de Paris, June Events, 17 June 2023. Photo © Zakary Braganca

*I have used “sensibility” previously to describe one of the steps/states involved in the process of creating dance experience and opening it on Imagination. 

Samuel Johnson defined “sensibility” thus (1755):

1. Quickness of sensation.

Modesty is a kind of quick and delicate feeling in the soul: it is such an exquisite sensibility, as warns a woman to shun the first appearance of every thing hurtful.

                                                                                        - Addison’s  Spectator

2. Quickness of perception.

Founder of Micadanses and festival Faits d’Hiver Christophe Martin honored for service to dance [By Tracy Danison]

“L’envahissement de l’être (danser avec Duras)” by Thomas Lebrun, Faits d’hiver 2023. Photo courtesy Festival Faits d’hiver © DR

Usually, when I say “They got what they deserve”, I mean, “They’re hoist on their own petard”. This time, however, perhaps in a sign that the Age of Aquarius really is just a glass of white-wine punch away, I mean no irony.

Christophe Martin, founder and director of  Micadanses dance creation and development center and the annual Faits d’Hiver dance performance event, more than merits the *Prix de la Personnalité Chorégraphique (2022-2023) awarded to him by the *Syndicat Professionnel de la Critique Théâtre, Musique et Danse. The critics cite Martin’s organization noos and his key role in dance performance creation, dance training and distribution, noting a “rare openness to esthetic diversity …”. 

Accepting the award, Martin declared: "I am honored that my career in service to dance has been recognized for its perseverance and originality.  I believe in a danse d’auteur: dance as personal art, as a way of thinking that is beyond words…"

“Portrait” by Rebecca Journo, Faits d’hiver 2023. Photo © Maxime Leblanc

Martin’s undertakings have been and continue very successful. Faits d’hiver celebrated its 25^th anniversary this year, honoring the choreographer and performer Thomas Lebrun and draing in more than 6000 spectators to venues all over the Paris region. Micadanses will celebrate 20 years of supporting dance through training, residencies and resources and public productions in 2024.  

Martin’s dedication to a danse d’auteur is indisputable. In my posts on The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words I have often found occasion to discuss original work encouraged, sponsored or put before the public by Christophe Martin.

Here’s what I’ll say in praise, in high praise, of Martin’s danse d’auteur: When Martin selects, encourages or puts on a piece, he shows a very cultivated knack for selecting a well-conceived, well-constructed, well-presented sensibility and (spectator) experience. Whether I’ve liked a piece selected by him or hated it or was indifferent to it, I’ve never once regretted being there with it. In Martin’s danse d’auteur, Dance, capital D, and seriousness, capital S, are always primary.

* “Prize for general choreographic work” … * “Union of Theater, Music and Dance Critics”

Faits d’hiver 2024, from 12 January to 9 February, will feature, among others, works by Mellina Boubetra and Nach, Harris Gkekas,  Tabea Martin, Leïla Ka, Shlomi Tuizer, Jean-Christophe Bleton, Silvia Gribaudi, Pedro Pauwels and Anne-Sophie Lancelin.

____________
The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words has featured Christophe Martin, Micadanses and/or Faits d’hiver in the following posts, among others:

Santé, Bonheur! Joy! Imagination! Discernment! Thoughts on some upcoming dance and performance [By Tracy Danison]

Something very much like love:  Sylvère Lamotte and Magali Saby dance “la faille” [By Tracy Danison]

More than dancin’: "Partitions(s) - Du décollement des sentiments et des affects", Jean-Christophe Boclé [By Tracy Danison]

How is Rebecca Journo’s “Portrait” like the proverbial hedgehog? It does tricks that count [By Tracy Danison]

Micadanses: Try some of this Surprise. Tastes like Imagination [By Tracy Danison]

A Paris contemporary dance & performance primer: Festival d’automne & Festival Kalypso, Faits d’hiver & Rencontres internationales [by Tracy Danison]

Reverse engineering choreography to create dance [by Tracy Danison]

Scene from “Necesito” by Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble chorégraphique du Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris,  Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

I saw Dominique Bagouet’s Necesito, pièce pour Grenade twice this year, in the space of 30 days: in May at the Palais de Chaillot and, in April, at the fine Auditorium Jean-Pierre Miquel in Vincennes, a well-heeled eastern Paris suburb.  

Both times, formally, at least, it was performed by the l’Ensemble chorégraphique of the Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris (CNSMDP); the Ensemble chorégraphique is not just a run-of-the mill student dance group.

The artistic production (as well as the sound) for the two shows was also the same. Notably, with Rita Cioffi, who danced the piece as a member of Bagouet’s troupe, doing the Reconstruction chorégraphique and with Christine Bombal, who also danced with Bagouet, acting as Responsable du master (original interpretation) to the Ensemble’s Maitresse de ballet.

The participative presence of Rita Cioffi and Christine Bombal and, perhaps, the reconstruction of music and set, especially the floor, seem essential to producing a quality materialization of Necesito. Dominique Bagouet‘s pieces are passed down through the personal experience and memory of performers and other witness. Rather than draw up a choreography, Bagouet would transform an atmospheric/feeling/sensibility into people moving within its space.

For instance, for Necesito, Bagouet has imagined the atmospheric of the last bastion of Muslim Spain through the lenses of “a queen in ecstasy, a Catholic king in crisis of self-doubt, a wailing emir, a dreamy Infante, a poltroon of a torero, a barefoot dancer, a basic tourist, a solitary gypsy and an Al Andalus wizard” … as experienced and evoked in the movement of some contemporary tourists, all of whom look good enough to eat.

 

Scene from “Necesito” by Dominique Bagouet, Ensemble chorégraphique du Conservatoire National Supérieur de la Musique et de la Danse de Paris.  Photo © Laurent Philippe.

The Briqueterie’s notes describe the choreo-scenographic result for the Necesito atmospheric pretty well: “In shorts and summer dresses, a slightly off-beat group of tourists walks with slow intensity around the scene, sitting, laying down, stretching voluptuously. A floor in rose-colored marble incrusted with mosaic tiles evokes the Al Hambra.”

On the ideal novel: Latent in every sentence is an alternative [By Sean Ashton]

All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour.

                                                                                                – Nabokov, Speak, Memory

I’ve come across this quote more than once as an epigraph to novels, most recently at the beginning of Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin. Perhaps novelists are drawn to it because it sheds light on the business of writing fiction. Nabokov is discussing his mother’s religious faith – specifically, her conviction that another world lies beyond this one – but that ‘glimpse’ of ‘something real’ is also a good description of the wider world we subconsciously assume lies beyond the dreamscape of any novel. A novel is an account told from a particular perspective, but I’m surely not alone in feeling, as I read any given example, that there is another novel, an Ideal Platonic realm that subsumes it, an ‘ordered reality’ that could be reported transparently without the author’s idiosyncrasies. In fact, that’s the challenge facing the novelist: to convince us that this place already existed before they came along. This Platonic novel is pure moonshine, yet tantalisingly real: latent in every sentence of Middlemarch is an alternative Middlemarch that might have been written. Literary criticism probably has a term for this that I should know about. For all I know, there are exercises being done in creative writing classes as I speak, for which students were asked to rewrite the opening of Middlemarch. Individually, their submissions would perhaps lack the purpose of the original, but collectively they would constitute a virtual Middlemarch that might be worth reading.

I suspect the only good novels I’ve written show an acute awareness of this virtuality. Living in a Land, discussed in a previous essay in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words, is a fictional memoir of a man who can only construct sentences in the negative. Basically, the conceit is that the speaker, by describing lots of things he’s never done, is able to describe them more vividly than if he had done them. It’s all voice. Or rather, only voice. No plot or characters.

Courtesy Sean Ashton

My latest novel, The Way to Work, is more conventionally plot-based, but the structural conceit still allows the Platonic bedrock to show through. A man boards his morning train, only to find his normal 8:08 service redirected into unfamiliar lands. When he asks where the train is going the other passengers ignore him. The train is sentient, able to prevent him going backwards by sealing the sliding doors shut, once he has passed through any given carriage. Thus, it is only possible to go forwards. But progress induces amnesia in most passengers: the further they go, the less they remember of their past life. The narrator seems immune to this, and is therefore able to advance further. His initial intention – ‘to locate the Guard, reach the Driver’ – turns into a quest of epic and ultimately spiritual proportions, the ‘Guard’ assuming the status of God in most passengers’ eyes, the Driver akin to Christ. However, as he approaches the front, he realises this theology is misbegotten, a symptom of their amnesia. 

The train appears to be of infinite length, and as he passes through thousands of carriages he reflects on his job as a sales executive with a cat litter manufacturer, and on his relations with his colleagues, one of whom he suspects is also on board. He is seduced by a woman called Heobah, who is in league with a man named Marlowe, the two of them comprising the sole resistance to the locomotive regime of the 8:08 service. They persuade him that he is the right man to overturn the train’s unidirectional tyranny, setting him the task of obtaining Universal Dispensation, i.e., the ability to go both forwards and backwards. This, she says, can only be done by making contact with the Guard or the Driver.

However, the Guard, far from being in control of the train, turns out to be the 8:08’s most accomplished lunatic. He puts the narrator to work as his secretary, answering his personal emails – which consist entirely of spam. But the narrator escapes and succeeds in reaching the front of the train. A revelation awaits him in the Driver’s cab, but does he interpret it correctly? His concluding remarks suggest that he sees himself, not as a prisoner of the train, but as an extension of its physical character: the human agent of its ‘completion’. The implication is that he has entered a kind of Purgatory, doomed to repeat the same journey again and again.

I now see that this implied repetition is a veiled acknowledgement of the ‘alternative’ versions of The Way to Work that might have been written instead of the one I wrote. It seemed to me that the writing had to have a generic tone in order to allow us to imagine how the narrator’s journey might pan out a second or third time, perhaps in the hands of another author. Some of the oldest tales in literature – in particular The 1001 Nights  – have a similarly generic feel, as though the original authors were conscious of making narrative templates that might be taken up by writers of the future. The recursive or circular form is like a handing on of the baton. One of my favourite examples is the short story ‘The Last Days of Muhammad Atta’ by the late Martin Amis. Right at the end, after Atta has steered the plane into the World Trade Centre, the story’s opening sentence is repeated: ‘On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.’ For all the praise heaped on Amis as a stylist, in this story he is quite restrained, as though sensing that too much flair will impede our willingness to imagine Atta’s last day played out again and again.

_______________

The Way to Work (Salt) is Sean Ashton’s latest novel. A sister article around its creation, entitled “A novel isn’t just a narrative, it’s an environment, a habitat that cultivates characters” appears in the 23 May edition of the Irish Times newspaper. The novel The Way to Work follows on Sampler (Valley Press, 2020), a selection of pieces from an imaginary encyclopaedia written entirely by poets; Living in a Land (Ma Bibliothèque 2017), a fictional memoir written in sentences constructed in the negative; and Sunsets (Alma Books 2007), a collection of reviews of imaginary artworks. Ashton has contributed poems, essays and stories to many other periodicals, including “Oxford Poetry”, “Poetry London”, “Poetry Ireland” and the philosophy journal “Collapse”. Ashton’s essay “ Performance art meets literary étrangeté” appeared in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 22 August 2022.  

Order The Way to Work (ISBN 9781784632922) in Britain from publisher Salt or from uk.bookshop.org, which specializes in distribution to independent booksellers. The Way to Work is also available from most international sites.

Woman invisibility: Ann-Eva Bergman, Glinda the Good Witch, ruby slippers, Gretchen’s Faust, Emmy Klinker and the fate of woman painters, etc., etc.

Marianne von Werefkin, Herbst (Schule), "Autumn (School)", 1907. Photo Courtesy Wikipedia

It’s Glinda, Good Witch of the West, who says the solution to a problem is as simple as closing your eyes and clicking together your personal pair of ruby slippers. I took Glynda at her word almost every day of my army career, hoping to wake up and out of it, safe and free, with soldiering an ugly, but fading, dream. It didn’t work.

The ruby slippers, Glinda’s estate lawyers say, are essential to the effectiveness of her hollow positivism... It won’t work for people in street shoes, let alone combat boots.

Glinda-style solutions come up because I’ve been thinking about why artistic retrospectives that feature woman as painter, such as the ongoing Anna-Eva Bergman exhibition at Paris’ Museum de l’Art Moderne (MAM-Paris), are so rare.

I say “’woman’ (singular) as painter” to imply that gender is an external force in a painter’s experience.

Emmy Klinker, "Landscape", 1918. Photo Courtesy Berlin 1918 - 1933

Closing my eyes – despite the harsh truth from Glinda’s estate mouthpieces, I still close my eyes when I scour my memory –  I remember only a 2014 Sonia Delaunay retrospective that included more than 400 (!) works, also at MAM-Paris. The show did a lot to show her paintings but nothing memorable in respect to her as painter.

I also remember that Delaunay featured in the 2015 Schirn art museum exhibition STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 (“Storm Women. Women avant-garde artists in Berlin 1910-1932”), curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer in, as it turns out, appropriately, Frankfurt-am-Main, the birthplace of Goethe and, thereby, of Gretchen.

The set up for STURM-Frauen returned the mostly fragmented oeuvre of its featured artists to their native scene, using as guides the notebooks and catalogs of the legendary gallerist, editor, promoter and painter Herwarth Walden, as well as the archives of the famous Sturm magazine.

I understand that most of the documentation was conserved by Nell Walden (1887–1975 - also featured in the exhibition). Luckily for us, Nell Walden had a Swedish passport, settled before the second big war in Switzerland, was able to weather her couple of husbands. When you look at it, she was also co- founder and -editor of the Sturm magazine and gallery. In addition to suggesting the name Herwarth Walden as a professional handle, Herwarth was her first husband.

It also seems that STURM-Frauen picked up on a 2012 exhibition called Sturm - Zentrum der Avantgarde (“Sturm - Center for the Avant-Garde”) in Wuppertal, Germany – by the way, home and performance space to Pina Bausch, the contemporary dance ur-choreographer. This exhibition, in turn, seems to have benefited from Germany’s late-post-war efforts to pick up the cultural pieces.

The STURM-Frauen exhibition bowled me over.

I was a man who suddenly discovers he has a long-hidden, parallel family of magical sisters, all of ‘em obvious blood plus spiritual relations.

I even met a previously unknown favorite sister among them, a certain Emmy Klinker (1891-1969). I noticed her because she painted people I have known along with a lot of my emotional color and landscape.

Klinker’s eye has Franz Marc color fluidness in it; her hand makes me think of Marc Chagall, but seems less emotionally contrived, more esthetically nuanced, than the great man’s stuff. She struck me as a pure painter in the same way as Emily Dickinson is pure poet: staying out of the way and to let me look.

The Herwarth-Nell Waldens represented European artists active in the Expressionist, Cubist, and Constructivist movements. Visual artists in the Sturm gallery stable included then- and now-renowned artists such as Kandinsky, Marc, Kokoschka, Klee and Chagall as well as the 30 woman artists presented in the STURM-Frauen exhibition.

In addition to Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter and color theorist Robert Delaunay, and the single and childless Emmy Klinker, the better known among these artists included Natalja Gontscharowa (1881–1962), Gabriele Münter(1877–1962) and Hilla von Rebay, ((1890-1967), respectively, wife of Mikhail Larionov, “founder” of Russian abstraction; first wife of Wassily Kandinsky; and  co-founder of the Guggenheim. 

Artists less- or un-known to me were Vjera Biller (1903–1940), Marcelle Cahn (1895– 1981), Marthe Donas (1885–1967), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), Helene Grünhoff (1880−?), Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876– 1923), Sigrid Hjertén (1885–1948), Magda Langenstraß-Uhlig (1888– 1965), Else Lasker-Schüler (1869–1945), Lavinia Schulz (1896–1924), Maria Uhden (1892–1918), and Marianne von Werefkin (1860–1938).

Because I had been so moved by STURM-Frauen and the work I had discovered there, until recently I had been closing my eyes at least once a week and wishing the exhibition would show up here in Paris.

Yesterday, Monday, I was having a pint with a dear friend of mine, a man of wit and talent from Germany. I mentioned Anna-Eva Bergman and STURM-Frauen and all that. He said, “Really? Interesting. Bergman’s the wife of Hans Hartung, isn’t she?” Then he asked the server for more chips.

So, there it is.

As far as I know, STURM-Frauen has not traveled, been reproduced or been picked up on or otherwise copied anywhere. The catalog, STURM-Frauen. Künstlerinnen der Avantgarde in Berlin 1910–1932 by Ingrid Pfeiffer and Max Hollein(ISBN : 9783868322774), is out of print. STURM-Frauen has tumbled, perhaps, into a ruck of positivist solo retrospectives of those woman painters with sufficient remaining oeuvre to highlight painting by women in the past.

I now reckon the void and failure of my STURM-Frauen wishes comes faute de ruby slippers – I have no power and money to make it otherwise.

In my wishing, I should have remembered that Gretchen, as earlier noted, born in Frankfurt with Goethe, is obviously the subject and hero of Faust.

But I was about as attentive to that fact when first I heard it as my friend was to me yesterday. It may even have been this friend who had made the remark .

Anyhow, it is just so difficult to pay attention to woman stuff when it comes to art, is it not?

Thinking about Glynda, Good Witch of the West and hollow positivist, Gretchen’s Faust, Anna-Eva Bergman as painter, Sonia Delaunay and her 400 works, the disappeared STURM-Frauen exhibition, me and my inattentive friend and the paintings of Emmy Klinker, has made me think that the dearth of woman painters is owing to woman “invisibility” more than anything else.

Invisibility is the tool of consciousness that enables groups and individuals to selectively blank out categories of real things, people, deeds, feelings and ideas, according as a given structure of consciousness requires.

Invisibility is the perceptual mechanics behind “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?” Cutting is its short form.

Invisibility does not interfere with the actual physics of reality. Say, building explosive spy drones.

The fate of Emmy Klinker and her works and days is a good example to help in understanding how woman invisibility works. It shows that there is a sort of rippling traffic light, a trinary flicker, that selects her out of consciousness even while leaving a “biography” of materialized traces of a life lived or just later projections by others.

Emmy Klinker’s creative and social lives were suggestive, novel- or Netflix-like, both showing real genius and fine character.

Klinker, they say, began painting at 16 – youthful interest apparently being a prime legitimating factor for woman painters. She was good enough to attract Kandinsky’s attention and became a part of that man’s famous Der Blaue Reitercircle. She was represented by Herwarth and Nell Walden, was particular friends with people such as fellow-creators Gabriele Munter, Der Blaue Reiter co-founder Franz Marc and the American “witness” to the period, Albert Bloch …

Apparently single, Klinker was also apparently wed to her creation. She was quite normally productive as we can deduce from her experience in Germany’s 1933-45 Bully-Boy Zeit. Klinker was culturally prominent, as well as a principled mensch.

The boys apparently saw enough of her to make Emmy Klinker a suitable whipping girl. She was named, along with her friend Franz Marc, already dead (killed in the First World War) and many others, including, just for instance Kokoschka and Matisse, a degenerate painter.

Klinker’s work Weiss Pferde (“White Horse”), for example, was original and popular enough to merit destruction to enthusiastic public contumely. Klinker’s cultural notoriety was such, I read someplace, as to merit a warning visit from indignant “Brown Tide” stalwarts.  

Because Klinker had courage enough to hide a Jewish friend at her house, she was sent to Dachau concentration camp for a three-month warning visit.

Although fairly soon after 1945 Klinker seems to have won prizes for her past work, it is unclear if she was producing and showing new work. Her work, from before 1936 or after, I can’t determine, but I think not, has featured in a few collective retrospectives in the past 20 years.

Why does painter Emmy Klinker touch me so? Because her self-portrait makes me think of Rimbaud reassuring his mother as to his respectability? No. It’s the woman invisibility that brushes out contexts and connections. For instance, I can think of no mention of Klinker in any Wikipedia entries for her painter friends and colleagues … All that is left of her is a lonely curriculum vitae, the CV isn’t the person who did that painting and the woman who did the painting is not my secret sister.

Worst of all, I’m as implicated in woman invisibility as anybody else. I’ve also cut people.

Invisibility is Glinda, Good Witch of the West: positivist solutions that really address a problem don’t really exist.

Invisibility is how Gretchen creates and shapes a book that even the author called Faust. Invisibility is my friend’s and my slip-slide attention to subjects that concern us.

And the STURM-Frauen painters?

A good, solid case study in how woman invisibility works. And that’s why STURM-Frauen, like woman painters generally, has slipped and slid down into an entry on its very fine curator’s CV.

Still, in the same way as the Waldens’ Sturm notes made the STURM-Frauen, the exhibitions’ 30 painters, can take you on a course in invisibility mechanics. No matter what the number of works on show and the esthetic and cultural merit, taken together, each “biography”, from Vjera Biller, euthanized, to Hilla von Rebay, philanthropist, to Marianne von Werefkin, stateless noble, to Maria Uhden, dead in childbirth, tells a story the mechanics of woman invisibility.  

The portraits, on the left, from top to bottom, are from the Schirn Museum's Sturm-Frauen and Flikr. From top to bottom, Emmy Klinker, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1918; Natalja Gontscharowa, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"), 1908 © Tate, London, 2015 ; Lavinia Schulz, Selbstbildnis ("Self-portrait"). Photo Courtesy Wikipedia; Maria Uhden, Frau mit Vogel "Woman with bird") 1917; Emmy Klinker, Bildnis einer jungen Frau (“Portrait of a young woman”) 1921; Marianne von Werefkin, "Self portrait". Photo: Google Art

 

Anna Eva Bergman: woman painter, woman’s painting, woman as painter [by Tracy Danison]

Anna-Eva Bergman  N°33 1947 ‘Ensomhet’ huset (gyllne snitt), “Solitude: the house (gold part)”

Gestern, hab’ich zu viel Weißwein getrunken…

It’s always so difficult to know where to begin. The sound of the phrase Gestern, hab’ich… makes me hear Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure. It reminds me, too, of how very dissimilar things, like bosons and quarks or frogs and badgers or faces and dances, are mostly similar. Someplace, even, everything is joined at the hip.

Which puts me in mind of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris’ exhibition of painter Anna-Eva Bergman’s work, put together by curator Hélène Leroy and called Voyage vers l'intérieur.

Born in Stockholm in 1909, raised in Norway, trained in Austria, dead at Grasse, France, in 1987, Bergman was part of the so-called Ecole de Paris: the vast numbers of mostly Euro-Atlantic artists who worked in or from Paris from 1900 to 1960.

MAM-Paris describes Bergman as a key figure in post-War European painting. And Bergman surely does have the necessary immortal hand and eye of a top quality painter. But what struck me about Voyage is not the high quality of Bergman’s work or her place in the Euro-Atlantic esthetic pantheon, but its success in underlining Bergman’s development as painter.

Anna-Eva Bergman N°6-1960 "Pyramide"/Pyramid. Photo © Claire Dorn

I came away from Voyage thinking, believing, that Bergman’s development is not so much a matter of visual styles, visions or ideas, periods, as, for example, with Picasso, but a matter of how she sees what she sees.

Bergman’s hand and eye manage to find, refine and then to paint her perception of the material world. I experience her work as sharing her perception with her. Contrast this with my experience of Picasso’s oeuvre: admiring his ability to manipulate perception, to put Dora Marr in pieces and put her together otherwise, so to say.

Bergman’s key-figureship among the giants of the Ecole de Paris is owing first, I think, to her evident ability to identify the elements of her own perception and to identify the structure she gives those elements. Second, she has the hand and eye to material represent the elements in her structure in such a way that a spectator can experience her seeing and perceiving.

Anna-Eva Bergman N°26-1962 "Feu"/Fire. Photo © Claire Dorn

For me, in situ, the take on Bergman as painter begins with the MAM’s good selection and placement of the artist’s early work. In addition to her remarkable hand and eye, the selection strongly marks Bergman’s admirations in contemporary painting. It’s Bergman but I feel I see, say, Otto Dix in some clubbers in decadent volupté or Fernand Léger, say in a garishly-colored geometric flying machine. I look out toward the long part of the gallery and her admirations have given way to exploration of Anna-Eva Bergman consciousness as a painter: a house called N°33 1947 ‘Ensomhet’ huset (gyllne snitt), “Solitude: the house (the gilded part)”. In the moment, I am just struck by its originality of the intriguing geometries and colors and texturings that make me say to myself “Sure, it’s Anna-Eva’s house”.

Later, when I do my reverse visit, I’ll realize that ‘Ensomhet’ exemplifies the particular quality of her life’s work. For me as a spectator, from ‘Ensomhet’ on, Voyage vers l’intérieur is not a tour of the development and refinement of Bergman’s perceptual or painterly essence or of her psyche. As a painter, she shares her way of seeing; her work become a conversation piece for my reflection, as sharer, on experience and perception.

Anna-Eva Bergman N°13-1976 "Deux Nunataks". Photo © Fondation Hartung-Bergman

Just to pick some ongoing themes that experiencing her work enables: how am I able to share Bergman’s how? How can I experience what I always think of as un-shareable: What is an individual if it’s joined at the hip with all other individuals? If such exists, what is the spice and everything nice, the snips, snails and puppy-dog tails that make for a “shared/true perception”? Is that “true” somebody’s Yahweh & Jesus cult or a Kant & (William) Blake coffee klatch? Submission under Authority or Freedom under Reason? ...

Back to the exhibition. It was very refreshing to come out of the Voyage vers l’intérieur feeling as if I’d had some insight into Bergman painter. That’s a rare enough thing whoever the painter may be. But it’s really, really rare when it comes to woman painters.

I think that is so because the curator needs to gather so many exemplary (chronological and written) inputs around an essentially Beyond Words topic - no matter what, when it comes to saying what is there and how so, it's bound to be jagged and incomplete. So, hats off to MAM-Paris and its curatorial teams. 

June Events 2023 dance performance festival features variety, environment and sense experience [By Tracy Danison]

“Peeling Back”, solo performance by Nina Santes. Photo © Roberto Martinez

DURING A BREAK BETWEEN COVID LOCKDOWNS, I went to a performance at one of the big theaters. About 30 minutes into it, people started walking out, saying they had come for “dance” and got “performance”. I became witness to an ongoing controversy. Something like What is dance? What is performance? Are they either-or, either-and or uniquely visual or narrative or choreographic? To be one or the other, must they include all the senses and all possible gestures or just some? Refreshing, given the circumstances. 

This is all fun to think about but I think that, after all this time, most dance performance spectators have got beyond the controversy and, following choreographer Yasmine Hugonnet,  accepted the notion of “movement art”. For the record, science is catching up to the notion that movement is complex whole body function. However it might be, most spectators today – if they aren’t vainly trying the guess what something “is about” – judge by results on themselves rather than some defined criteria: didja’ya enjoy it? To go further than that, most get a glass of something and, perhaps, a (light) snack, and puzzle out what it was they enjoyed or not.

 

“Play 612”, trio performance by Daniel Larrieu. Photo © Benjamin Favrat

Atelier de Paris’ 2023 June Events program is giving spectators the widest variety of movement art forms – dance performance – I’ve so far seen in one program to enjoy, puzzle (and drink) over. I’ve been thinking a lot about movement forms and genres recently, so the news proves that synchronicity definitely exists. But it is no surprise. I mean a high-quality program that fully engages spectator interest is no surprise. Atelier de Paris ordinarily offers some of most creative and innovative dance performance anywhere. Just off the cuff, and only in the last six months, and just to mention two that might leave some darkly muttering “Balanchine” and two others that might have provoked squawks of  “performance”, I’ve been moved by accomplished movement pieces choreographed by Rebecca Journo, Aïna Alègre,  Dorothée Munyaneza/Radouan Mriziga and Ivana Müller.

June Events 2023 goes a lot deeper than forms of choreography. Atelier de Paris Artistic director Anne Sauvage, who, together with her team, put together the event, says that the program’s featured creators this year will be asking both “what can be and what must be dance performance” – filling in definitions and stretching possibilities.

 

"Tatiana", solo performance by Julien Andujar.  Photo © Vincent Curutchet

She writes that this 17th edition of the annual event will offer live “innovative, plural, open dance forms” that entangle body, poetry and dance to generate “magic, trance, energy”. Performances, she continues, will call on seeing, of course, but also on physical feeling, taste and smell, with particular attention to the experience of live music, especially of the voice. With a single exception, all the pieces on show are 2022 or 2023 creations. Many pieces include the immediate environment in the choreography: the neighboring Parc Floral de Paris or the Bois de Vincennes and urban space. Also featured are public and child-oriented performances, work integrating sign language (LSF), live music and pre-performance workshops and interviews.

I see the program as having psychological and an esthetic perimeters represented, roughly, by two movement choreographies. Habib Ben Tanfous’ Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas – around personal and social identity – and Aina Alègre’s THIS IS NOT (an act of love & resistance) – that knits dance fragments and phrases, scenes and symbols into a vocabulary of “movement energy”, referencing both Air and Breath – opens Atelier’s gift for participants – “participants” because we are talking live performance experience as well as dance performance, as much for THIS IS NOT as for June Events 2023 as a whole.

 

“MOS”, duo performance by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou. Photo © Onassis Stegi/Ωνάσσης Στέγη

In addition to good old enjoyment, Je lègue and THIS IS NOT, in one way or another, touch on all the questions the June Events program opens out for spectators: Surely, What am I? Where am I? What’s dance? What’s performance? What’s movement? What’s theater and how is it different from performance? Are the movement arts “body” arts or un-narrative arts or narrative unpicked or complemented? And what’s it all for?  

I don’t know.

But I do know that, in light of advanced search algorithms aggressively marketed as “intelligence” and simulated sight and sound aggressively marketed as “reality” and increasingly solid evidence that all this virtual stuff is not good for a human being, the most important question that a spectator might start asking during June Events 2023 is What is the importance of being here now with (each other, the world around us)?

________

June Events 2023 Performances 30 May – 17 June

Featured creators are asking both “what can be and what must be dance performance” – filling in definitions and stretching possibilities.

Prepare your June Events 2023 experience

13 May: Let’s dance! Open dance, music and singing workshops led by featured June Events creators. Free entry. No previous dance or performance experience necessary.

30 May, 19h30: Ici je lègue ce qui ne m’appartient pas, Solo, 50 min. Création 2023 by Habib Ben Tanfous, cie FINEK . Atelier de Paris

30 May, 21h: THIS IS NOT (an act of love & resistance), 9 performers, 1h05. Creation 2022 by Aina Alegre, Centre chorégraphique national de Grenoble & STUDIO FICTIF with

live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

1 June, 20h: Tatiana, Solo, 1h45. Creation 2022 by Julien Andujar, VLAM Productions. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

2 June, 18h: Carnavole improvised performance with Joana Schweizer and Miguel Filipe, with live music. Place de l’Église, Vincennes.

2 June, 20h: Ici et là, five professional performers accompanying prisoner participants 40 minutes. Création 2023 by Claire Jenny, cie Point Virgule. Atelier de Paris

3 June, 19h: Carnavole improvised performance with Joana Schweizer, Miguel Filipe, Lara Oyedepo and Justine Lebas, with live music. Mairie du 12ème, Paris

6 June, 19h: Point Z in situ documentary performance, 1h30 by  Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Compagnie Parc. Bois de Vincennes (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

6 June, 19h30: Empire of a Faun Imaginary, four performers, 1h05. Creation 2022 by Simone Mousset. Atelier de Paris

6 June, 21h: BOW’T TRAIL Rétrospek, trio, 1h15. Creation 2020 by Rhodnie Désir, RD Créations with live music. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

8 June, 19h: Point Z in situ documentary performance, 1h30 by  Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Compagnie Parc. Bois de Vincennes (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

8 June, 19h30: Haut-Fond, solo, 1h. Creation 2023 by Céline Cartillier cie Météores. Atelier de Paris

8 June, 21h: Peeling Back solo, 1h30. Creation 2023 Nina Santes, cie La Fronde. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

10 June, 19h: Point Z in situ documentary performance, 1h30 by  Ikram Benchrif & Paul Girard, Compagnie Parc. Bois de Vincennes (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

10 June, 19h30: Open/Closed duo, 50 minutes. Creation 2022 by Pierre Piton, cie La PP, with live music. Atelier de Paris

10 June, 21h: Les Noces & Pièce d’ensemble 11 performers, 1h30 with intermission. Creations by La Manufacture, Salva Sanchis & Alma Söderberg. Théâtre de l’Aquarium

13, 14 June, 19h30: The Game of Life for six performers, 50 minutes. Creation 2022 by Liz Santoro, Pierre Godard, cie Le principe de l’incertitude and Jean-Yves Macé, cie l’Instant Donné with live music. Le Carreau du Temple

15 June, 18h: Fila Fila Manani duo, 30 minutes. Creation 2023 by Tidiani N’Diaye, cie copier coller. Atelier de Paris

15 June, 19h30: Des Oiseaux five performers, 1h15. Création 2023 by Joana Schweizer, Aniki Vóvó with live music.

15 June, 21h: Autour d’Hurlula, incantations dans la forêt, in situ performance for trio, 1h30 Creation Flora Détraz cie PLI with live music. DJ set by Miguel Filipe follows. Parc Floral (Rendezvous at Atelier de Paris)

17 June 19h30: MOS duo, 45 minutes. Creation 2022 by Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, Onassis Stegi. A “dancing nursery” is available during the program. Atelier de Paris

17 June 21h: Play 612 trio, 1h. Création 2018 by Daniel Larrieu Astrakan, Collection Daniel Larrieu. Atelier de Paris

17 June 22h: Down duo, 25 minutes. Creation 2023 by Mélissa Guex, cie Sumo. DJ set by Klaire Alice follows. Atelier de Paris

Zao Wou-Ki at MAM Paris: intriguing (painterly) commentary on modern art in Europe [By Tracy Danison]

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Encre 79, N°6, 1979. Photo: Charles Delepelaire/Parisienne de Photographie © Adago, Paris

A donation of nine Zao Wou-Ki paintings has recently been added to the Museé de l’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM Paris). The donation, by the poet’s widow, Françoise Marquet, brings the museum’s holding to eleven paintings, four India ink drawings, four prints and seven vases. The new (and the old works, too) are a treat as well as a useful addition to the museum’s fund of critically important work.

Born in Beijing in 1920, arriving in France in 1948, Zao Wou-Ki was in at the beginning China’s opening to the modern European takes on visual and plastic art. He attended China’s first arts faculty, the China Academy of Art between 1935 and 1941, studying there under Fang Ganmin, an early advocate for a fusion of China and European practices. The academy, founded in 1929, supervised by French-trained painter and educator Lin Fengmian, promoted the idea that, in a modern society, art could take the place of religion – a common enough idea in art circles in Europe at the time and not far from the surface today. The academy has survived all China’s political vicissitudes; it has operated under its original name since the 90s.

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Hommage à Henri Matisse II 21.5.93

Though there’s absolutely no visual resemblance that I know of, Zao Wou-Ki’s work always puts me in mind of the ideograms of the I Ching. These invite the onlooker to contemplate the natural forces represented in the light of a question. Zao’s work, especially his ink drawings, seem to emphasize the role of onlooker perception. Like the I Ching, Zao seems to call to pure perception, not to the self that is perceiving nor to the particular structures of what is perceived.

The emphasis on individual onlooker perception seems to me unique among the moderns with whom Zao associated, as well as those whose influence he claimed, including Matisse, Picasso and Cezanne.

In contrast to Zao, all three artists – and their contemporaries, too –  seem to be trying to impose some specific underlying form of the world perceived, whether that’s atomic lattices or color theory or some projected psychology or political message.

At least in the MAM’s newly fortified collection, Zao seems to go out of his way to underline his difference with his contemporaries without spelling out what that difference may be (which makes sense).

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, Citrons, 1949-1950. Photo ©Naomi Wenger

For instance, Zao’s Hommage à Henri Matisse II (already in the collection) invites me to wonder where, exactly, the old color maven is to be found in a rising pillar of black between rose and blue, mostly up and down brush strokes. My visual memory finds itself somewhere between Yves Klein and Rothko – no easy connection to Matisse. Is Zao trying to call attention to something implicit in Matisse’s famous color and figure or to his own approach to perception?

Also, a still life called Citrons (part of the recent donation) recalls the intense “real-reality” value of Cézanne’s take on these homely scenes. But Zao entirely dispenses with the older artist’s visual abundance and warmth of color. Citronsmakes me feel I’m reading Heidegger’s essay through the sole of Van Gogh’s Shoes – am I missing how manipulative Cézanne is?

None of the intention I’m lending Zao is out of the ball park. He had a broad of view of how visual art comes to be and plenty of the type of experience in living that tends to blunt the sense that you know what the world is about.  For his romantic companions, Zao chose the composer Lalan, the actress and later sculptor Chan May-Kan and the art historian and curator Françoise Marquet (who made the donation).

Zao, Wou-Ki 趙無極, A la mémoire de mon frère Wou-Wei ,15.12.22-11.02.79). Photo: Courtesy Musée de l’art Moderne de Paris

Zao claimed to be an acolyte to Paul Klee as art theorist as well as a painter. Among his many friends and acquaintance in his adopted country, he counted poets, writers, and even politicians, among many others, poet and painter Henri Michaux, novelist François Cheng (who, among many other endeavors, translated classics of French poetry into Chinese), the sculptor Alberto Giacometti (who also spend a lot of time wondering what was what and why), the Résistance hero and high culture advocate, André Malraux, and l. M. Pei, another important figure in the China-Europe esthetic fusion and architect of, notably, the pyramid of the Louvre.

Have a good long look yourself if you’re in Paris. God knows, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to see Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne. And then, there are also many more works by Zao at Musée Cernuschi, musée des Arts de l’Asie de la Ville de Paris.

“Dancefloor” and “Acid Gems” fit and knit movement energy together for Ballet de Lorraine [By Tracy Danison]

“Acid Gems” by Adam Linder, inspired by George Balanchine's "Jewels". Photo © Laurent Philippe

I follow the work of the Ballet de Lorraine, so I took the fast train to Nancy, the troupe’s seat, to see its Spring 2023 premiers, Adam Linder’s Acid Gems and Michèle Murray’s Dancefloor. Stepping on to the platform, I walked down the short Neo-plastic and LED hallway, then crossed the entry-hall-commercial-court and out into a broad plaza.

Behind me, essentially unchanged since 1856, the station’s sober façade of yellowish brick with a big clock surmounted by the ducal arms partially hides the contemporary interior. Up a slope and straight ahead, the old town. To my left, the Tour Thiers, after Adolphe Thiers, founder of the fabled Third Republic: the fall of Napoleon III, the loss of Alsace & Lorraine, the Commune, Prussians on the Champs Elysées, the Belle Epoque and all that jazz. The thing might be La République’s pecker were a republic made of glass and metal. Just beyond, where the old town starts, the Art Nouveau restaurant Excelsior, serving decent meals off clean and quality linen since 1911. To the right, the 1920s-something Printemps department store. An Art Déco battle wagon. And then, straight ahead, between and slightly behind the restaurant and the battle wagon of consumption, an amazingly pleasing, almost-baroque façade.

The difference between Art Déco and Art Nouveau is mostly flowers.

“Dancefloor” by Michèle Murray, explores how people fit themselves together. Photo © Laurent Philippe

It all fits together, somehow. Teases time. Pleases the eyes. Intrigues the brain. It's a mirror of what the Ballet de Lorraine does for me.

That’s what the guest creators Murray and Linder do, too: fit people and genres and times together. Murray’s Danceflooruses interpersonal interaction (on a dance floor) to explore how people fit themselves together. Linder’s Acid Gems, using George Balanchine’s 1967 Jewels extravaganza as inspiration, “explores the possible links between dance genres, styles and their influences”.

Meanwhile, in New York, the Ballet’s choreographic duo Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley are celebrating Merce Cunningham with their 2019 re-birthing of Cunningham and John Cage’s obscure 1944 dance-play For Four Walls. The Jacobsson-Caley couple aims to fit the Cunningham-Cage piece’s “history and our history with Merce” and identify some of the crackle in a creative and romantic entanglement. For Four Walls, is playing at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
on 21 & 22 April 2023.

Criticism and esthetics are largely matters of trying to figure out how things fit. I’ve been thinking a lot about how varied dance genres, gestures and postures are fit together. I’ve imagined choreographer Aina Alègre conjuring up an “energy fitting process”. I imagine her plucking fragments and phrases from a big box, fitting them by trial and error until she gets the buzz and crackle of her choreographic happening just right.

“Dancefloor” by Michèle Murray, dance is as encounter does. Photo © Laurent Philippe

I look at Murray’s and Linder’s work in the same light. Like Alègre, they’re practicing “energy fitting”; talking about dealing with forms, genres, vocabularies, fragments and phrases is certainly pertinent, but in the end, it’s all just a nod to the past by masters who are working out a new approach to movement.  

Coming away from Dancefloor, I’d say Murray feels dance performance is as human encounter does. Wobbling out on weakened knees from Acid Gems, I was convinced that Linder had demonstrated the real power of movement by making a parody of dance history.

At view, I thought of Murray’s dance floor as a lake. Around the banks of the lake, in shadow, clumps of people in street clothes chat and gaze and wait for an encounter. The scene as a whole – people-in-waiting-people-encountering –  is suspended in what is almost white noise: the beatless, rhythmless sound of an absorbing tension, like the skin of water or like ice. The clumps of people show and meet and glide, take form on the tension. As spectator, I see dance in the encounters. In the end, I can pick out very little identifiable dance gesture, posture or fragment or phrase (though if Murray’s premise hadn’t worked so well, I might have been able to).

“Acid Gems” by Adam Linder, movement that happens. Photo © Laurent Philippe

A (rather small) audience gives Adam Linder’s hard-driving 30-minute Acid Gems three very hard-driving curtain calls. That enthusiasm is because Acid Gems works as a spectacle and dance: because of the acid-head hues and flashes soaking the stage, because of its crowd of dance performers in au corps that run from blood-red to obscene-skin and because of a strong, attractive beat. Because each dance performer has an individual grasp of their own movement and how they and their movement fit in with their fellows. …

Distance, movement, color, sound, all carefully calculated to suck the spectator into the fray. But I feel that, as choreographer, Linder has ensured that every element of the scene has its own metric and this goes for bodies and their parts and their movement perimeters. Toes and feet, butts and hips, backs and bellies and bounds and leaps, leaping and bounding, brushing and touching and curling and crossing might seem to move from fragment to phrase, from mazurka to cluster fuck and back again but that's only what can be said – the vocabulary of dance … What happens is the happening of movement, beyond words but not beyond sensibility. Like Balanchine’s Jewels, Gems is spectacle, but like no Balanchine spectacle ever seen, because while Jewels is show-dance, Gems is movement that happens.

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Catch the Ballet de Lorraine in France this summer

4 May 2023 Valenciennes - Le Phénix Scène nationale: 
 Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot”, Tatiana Julien’s “Decay”; Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley, “For Four Walls”

22 May 2023 Paris - Musée de l’Orangerie - Trisha Brown’s “Twelve Ton Rose” - Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s “Access to pleasure”

28 June 2023 Paris - Le Carreau du Temple, Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s 
”Discofoot”

1 July 2023 Nantes - Cours Franklin Roosevelt (Town Center Nantes) - Petter Jacobsson & Thomas Caley’s “Discofoot”

10-11 July Paris - Musée du Louvre - Maud Le Pladec’s “Static Shot”